< + > How Unity Health Is Improving Rural Care With Technology and New Funding

Unity Health, a provider with 28 clinics and specialty centers in 8 counties of rural Arkansas, is managing to expand and to improve its services with the help of rural health transformation funds and their MEDITECH Expanse EHR. Unity Health has been continually adding new services, such as a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and diabetes care, using 2.2 million dollars from rural health transformation funds. In a recent interview at the MEDITECH LIVE conference, CIO Jim Poor says that they listen to their patients to find out what new services they need. Unity Health also started a residency program in the expectation that the residents will come back to work for them.

Through mergers, they ended up for a while with three different EHRs. This made it difficult to get data for better care, according to Poor, and annoyed patients because they had to visit different portals for different doctors. Now they are unified around the MEDITECH Expanse cloud-based EHR. Kristie Meachum, Director of Information Systems, shared with us that the portals were particularly hard to combine, but they achieved it.

Poor said that the unified EHR helped them achieve a high Leapfrog safety grade.

Among the MEDITECH products they use are Care Compass to identify care gaps, the Community Care Transition Portal to work more closely with post-discharge facilities,  Traverse Exchange for data interchange, Business Clinical Analytics (BCA) to keep their high Leapfrog score, and Point of Care handheld devices for scanning bar codes to improve medication adherence.

Unity Health uses Suki for ambient AI documentation within Expanse, saving doctors up to three hours of documentation every night. Unity Health will soon roll out the Expanse Now provider app to further improve provider satisfaction. They are planning to install the Luma scheduling package, which will be particularly useful for patients who travel long distances and want to schedule all their appointments on the same day. Unity Health is installing remote patient monitoring tools, especially for glucose and blood pressure monitoring. And they look forward in a few years to offering televisits and telenursing.

Check out our recent interview with Jim Poor and Kristie Meachum from Unity Health to see how they’re leveraging technology to expand the care they provide their community.

Learn more about MEDITECH: https://ehr.meditech.com/

Learn more about Unity Health: https://www.unity-health.org/

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