Last week I had the great opportunity to attend the MEDITECH Live conference in the beautiful MEDITECH conference center in Fobxorough, MA. As most you know by now, I love user conferences because it brings together a community of like minded individuals to share their experiences with each other. Plus, MEDITECH gets a chance to share some of their plans with their users along with hearing from their users.
The MEDITECH Live conference was great because their clients are great. As I mentioned to Helen Waters, Executive Vice President and COO at MEDITECH, I don’t think a company can help but display their culture on stage. In MEDITECH’s case, they’re a group of practical, down to earth, thoughtful, kind, professionals that are passionate about using healthcare technology to improve healthcare. What’s interesting is that this same culture is largely reflected in the MEDITECH users.
While at the conference, we captured some of the key perspectives, announcements, and ideas that were shared at the conference on social media. Below, you’ll find a round up of these shares along with a little bit of additional commentary.
I think there’s something beautiful about MEDITECH Live starting off with a nurse leading the event. If you don’t know Cathy Turner, she’s been at MEDITECH for a while, but once a nurse – always a nurse. It was great to have a clinician kicking things off.
I’m always interested if a company’s vision, mission, and values are on display. In this case, they literally started by sharing them. You can see them online here as well.
I really loved that MEDITECH shared some key stats at the conference. 2000+ customers is a lot of customers, but I’m even more impressed that MEDITECH has been able to move over 1000 of those customers to the Expanse platform. That’s a really big deal for MEDITECH and for their customers. Plus, I love seeing MEDITECH have so many new sites in the last 12 months.
I think they captured the current healthcare landscape really well with these 3 points. I feel like every healthcare organization is feeling these and it’s hanging over every healthcare conference I attend. The reality is that every healthcare IT organization is being asked to do more with less and the pace of change is accelerating.
I like the idea that MEDITECH put forward around intuitive care. A common theme I heard at the conference was that much of the regulations that were implemented by the EHRs were things being done to the clinician. Much of the AI and other technology that’s being implemented now is being done for the physician. That feels in line with the idea of intuitive care.
You can read more about MEDITECH’s agentic AI efforts in their press release. I’d describe their approach to AI as thoughtful. They want to ensure that the AI they implement is trusted and makes an impact for their customers. They don’t want to just do AI for AI’s sake.
One thing I love about MEDITECH is they generally try to have keynotes that are of a benefit to their customer base and don’t just push their own agendas. They choose real keynotes that are meant to educate and inspire their community. That was exemplified in their keynote by Duncan Wardle, Former Head of Innovation & Creativity at Disney.
As you’d expect, his keynote is difficult to capture on social media or in an article. However, the simple concept of killing creativity or unleashing creativity in your organization is a powerful message. The best example of this was a simple mindset shift he offered us by moving from reacting to ideas by saying “No, because…” and instead saying “Yes, and…” It’s amazing how the former kills innovation and creativity and how the later fosters it. Plus, I absolutely loved the idea that “Yes, and…” also means that you’re co-creating something which gets better buy-in for the ideas.
How would you characterize most healthcare organizations? More of a “No, because…” or a “Yes, and…”?
I was particularly excited about this panel because it was such a great mix of perspectives: a provider, a payer, an AI association, and an interop nerd facilitated by MEDITECH’s interoperability expert. I will say that the panel took on more of an AI perspective because CHAI was involved, but there’s no doubt going to be an interesting overlap between AI and interop.
Keeler stated what I think all of us that have been following the interoperability space feel and may not have admitted. It is pretty instense with a lot of unknowns and pressures to really make interoperability a reality despite the challenges.
I love hearing about new efforts to leverage data more effectively. I’d never heard of the Puerto Rico effort, but it makes a lot of sense to pool data. I think we’re about to learn a lot about ways that AI models do and don’t work across various data sets. I think that’s why some of the most exciting AI initiatives are essentially collecting their own data like AI Medical Scribes for examples.
This comment kind of felt out of place in an interoperability conversation, but it definitely was thought provoking. What do you think of this idea?
The idea of clean data was an important theme in this session. Keeler is 100% right about the quality of the AI medical scribe data. Not to mention the consistency. Is it controversial to say that less than perfect data is going to be ok because AI will adjust? I think that scares most people in healthcare.
I loved this perspective from HCA when it comes to their data. When we first implemented EHR software, consistency of health data wasn’t really a priority. The opportunity for HCA to move to Expanse and create that intentional and consistent data is a really beautiful thing.
I agree with Keeler when it comes to providers sticking their heads in the sand. That’s going to be problematic for most. Although, for many hospitals that are just trying to survive, this is probably a hard concept. What’s true is that payers desire for the data is insatiable. They’re going to find it through one means or another. It makes sense for providers to collaborate rather than have the payers go around them for the data.
We shouldn’t need to say this, but it’s a lesson that’s been a challenge for a healthcare for a while. We create these big healthcare data respositories or we share all of this data between systems and then what? If we’re not intentional about what we’re going to do with the data, we can share all the data in the world between healthcare organizations, but it will do little to improve the lives of patients and healthcare organizations. The work of making healthcare data useful and impactful is much harder than sharing the data.
Definitely some fascinating perspectives and ideas from the MEDITECH Live keynotes that I attended. I think MEDITECH takes more of a big picture view with their keynotes and saves some of the specific features and functions for other sessions which is stylisticly different than other EHR user conferences. What did you think of what was shared? What would you add? Let us know on social media.
MEDITECH is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
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