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The storm came on suddenly and without warning.
It lashed the broad, slate-gray waters of Mille Lacs Lake with stinging rain. The chartered fishing boat pitched side to side while we clung to coolers and rented tackle, huddled beneath awnings, and pulled collars over our heads. There was little we could do but look at one another and laugh.
We were out boating on the rural Minnesota lake as part of a visit with one of our partner hospitals— Mille Lacs Health System (MLHS) —celebrating their recent initiative, “Next Chapter: Building Our Healthy Future.” A massive undertaking, the project involved a 42,000 sq ft. addition and 10,000 sq ft. refurbishment to provide better inpatient rooms, a new emergency department, kitchen, cafeteria, lobby, same-day surgery, lab, sleep center, and more.
But a trip started in high spirits had now taken a turn for the worse.
Seeing our misgivings, the fishing guide, sipping a coffee from the doorway of his small pilot’s cabin, assured us: “It’ll pass soon.”
Almost as soon as he'd uttered these words, the howling wind died, the clouds broke, and the lake again turned a dazzling gold in the evening sun.
A feature of Mille Lacs's climate, squalls—fast and blistering storms—race across its shallow, 207 square-mile surface, catching unwary sailors in a sudden deluge of epic proportions. Those who attempt to stay ahead of the gale, or make harbor, often find themselves caught in the rain and waves indefinitely. Experienced fishermen know that it’s best to turn the bow into the oncoming storm and reach calmer waters that much sooner.
Rural hospitals today face hiring and retention issues, employees aging into retirement, remote locations, patient outmigration, and outdated technology.
While it’s not easy to outpace these problems, there are solutions available right now: patient-centered technology, innovative partnerships, and forward-thinking actions by hospital leadership willing to steer into the headwinds.
Our most recent testimonial highlights how, through a collaborative partnership with MEDHOST, MLHS has consistently provided exceptional care to the people of Mille Lacs County and the surrounding area, despite undergoing rapid change and contending with the ongoing challenges faced by many rural providers.
Watch the full story here.
After breaking ground in 1956, MLHS began as a community-owned, non-profit hospital with two satellite clinics. In the last 40 years, it has expanded into an organization of five clinics, a nursing home, ambulatory emergency care center, homecare and hospice serving a 60-mile area comprised of almost 25,000 central Minnesotans.
We offer cloud-based clinical and financial solutions and engagement platforms that enable rural hospitals to enhance care, streamline facility management, and maximize patient volumes and profitability along with clinical and financial services that fit any budget. We also drive initiatives like chronic condition management, access to health and wellness content, and community engagement.
To learn more about how MEDHOST can partner with your facility to help weather the storm, please get in touch with us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Mille Lacs Health System (MLHS), a community-owned, not-for-profit healthcare organization, is situated approximately 80 miles north of the Twin Cities in central Minnesota. It serves a predominately rural population within Mille Lacs and surrounding counties, as well as residents of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
The hospital is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion, including better inpatient rooms, a new emergency department, kitchen, cafeteria, lobby, same-day surgery, lab, sleep center, and more.
By integrating HIT systems through a collaborative partnership with MEDHOST, MLHS has consistently provided exceptional care to the people of Mille Lacs County and the surrounding area, despite undergoing rapid change.
Rural America is home to more than 60 million people, many of whom lack easy access to healthcare and tend to be at a higher risk for poor health outcomes than those living in more concentrated areas.
While rural providers work tirelessly to address health disparities among these underserved communities, they face an uphill battle. Outdated transportation infrastructure and labor shortages are compounded by dwindling revenue, while social factors such as rising death rates, widespread opioid misuse, and a high proportion of uninsured patients strain already overburdened resources.
This is a battle that community and critical access facilities are losing. Since January 2013, nearly 100 rural hospitals have been forced to close their doors forever.
In this blog, we’ll cover the current healthcare landscape as seen through the lens of a rural healthcare provider and touch on key strategies that hospitals can adopt, right now, to continue providing for the friends, family, and neighbors that make up the communities they serve.
New market-driven strategies supported by technological advances will be necessary for the long-term sustainability of rural hospitals.
In order to keep their doors open, these facilities must start focusing on the following strategies for continued success:
Customer relationship management (CRM), social media, online portals, and mobile applications, which are more targeted and economical than conventional advertising or community outreach, will increasingly be the driving forces behind the growth initiatives of rural providers.
Due to the higher likelihood of Medicare or Medicaid coverage for rural populations, funding for rural hospitals is dependent on meeting performance and quality benchmarks. Hospitals can better monitor and enhance patient outcomes by utilizing affordable mobile technologies and subscriptions to analytics-as-a-service.
A dependable healthcare IT partner can support institutions in expanding digital strategies to continuously engage with customers, develop a brand, and maintain compliance.
While the pandemic encouraged legislation that has helped rural hospitals bridge the patient-provider divide, such as increased flexibility related to telehealth, ongoing issues related to connectivity and recruitment put these technological innovations out of reach for many providers.
Rural hospitals should consider features and functionality specifically configured for smaller hospitals when evaluating HIT solutions. By selecting market-appropriate solutions, these providers can improve ROI and lessen the chance of cost overruns and other interruptions, which can occur when overly complicated systems are put into place without sufficient support.
Another option to lower the cost of ownership for health IT is through hosted solutions. Hospitals can host clinical and financial data through a technology partner, saving upfront hardware costs and decreasing the need for internal IT maintenance.
Interoperability, or the secure and easy exchange of electronic health information (EHI), is essential to providing value-based care, and remaining compliant, in the digital age.
While costs, staffing constraints, and on-site space restrictions may complicate deploying and maintaining EHR technology, hospitals that fail to achieve sufficient interoperability will be unable to comply with Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) price transparency rules.
Read more about the financial benefits of achieving interoperability and the opportunity price transparency represents for rural hospitals in our recent blog.
Despite a rapidly changing healthcare landscape, rural hospitals stay rooted in their communities by adopting market-driven technological solutions.
As a proud partner of our nation’s rural health providers, MEDHOST can provide the right products, at the right price, to help these facilities provide quality patient care and maintain a healthy business.
To learn more, contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or dial 1.800.383.6278.
US Hospitals continue to struggle against unrelenting financial headwinds. As we round the corner on 2022, cumulative profit margins have sunk to an abysmal -0.33%, according to a recent report from KaufmanHall.
Expenses remain a significant, industry-wide challenge. The high cost of labor, compounded by inflation, continues to eat away at revenue and worsen already critical workforce shortages.
Unsurprisingly, rural, community and critical access facilities bear the brunt of these challenges. With smaller operating budgets and fewer resources, these hospitals consistently see less money coming through the door than their larger counterparts.
In this climate, expensive performance monitoring capabilities are easily dismissed as a luxury. However, the ability to find and root out missing revenue with reliable analytics may be the edge that these community providers need to stay in the game.
The operating budgets at smaller facilities are often too lean for one-size-fits-all, cost-cutting measures.
Even small hospitals have numerous departments, each with unique challenges, and determining where to start can be difficult.
But even so, the core revenue cycle stages remain consistent throughout the industry, and an initial, birds-eye analysis should reveal any opportunities for optimization. For example, tracking basic metrics like discharge-not-final-billed encounters, denial rate, and AR aging help paint a clearer picture of financial health.
Secondary considerations include any departments generating revenue and those most affected by throughput and capacity issues (e.g., surgical services, emergency, cath lab).
Whenever we evaluate performance, in any context, established standards are necessary to set goals and avoid unnecessary conflict. Analytics and performance reporting solutions are no different.
And while established standards are crucial, it’s equally important to know when and where to remain flexible. Working with a trusted healthcare IT partner can ensure hospitals have the tools they need to adapt to whatever the market throws their way.
The second key component of evaluating performance is having something to compare it to. Standards must be rooted in measurable, external criteria.
By establishing baseline metrics based on industry targets, hospitals can gauge how well they measure up against the competition.
This can be achieved by working with a third party that provides facility-to-facility comparisons among healthcare provider groups, as well as the capability to share information and success stories without compromising sensitive data.
Metrics don’t help anyone if they aren’t straightforward and easy to access.
Today, that level of convenience is synonymous with mobile applications. Working with a partner that can provide an application that supports a mobile UX ensures metrics can be accessed in a format that ensures maximum usability.
Although access is vital, building a reliance on metric-based practices is just as important as convenience. Smart interface design, built on decades of IT innovation, provides a user-friendly experience without the costly and time-consuming training that smaller hospitals simply can’t afford.
Readily accessible information that is easy to digest helps providers get back to what they do best—providing exceptional care.
To learn more about how MEDHOST can help establish actionable metrics and analytics, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278
On December 10, 2021, a vulnerability for a widely used file logging utility called Apache Log4j was made public to the world. This particular vulnerability received the highest Vulnerability Risk Rating possible.
This article will discuss how zero-day vulnerabilities, like the Log4J exploitation, can cause struggles for smaller hospital information technology and security departments. We will also cover how these exploitations illustrate the need for prioritized cybersecurity preparedness and properly optimized security tools.
Zero-day events like the Log4J exploitation are problematic for various reasons.
Recovery timeframes are unforgiving. A zero-day exploit means that the "bad guys" can take advantage of a security gap before the "good guys" have an opportunity to patch or mitigate the vulnerability.
In healthcare, this means a hospital's IT and security staff must immediately drop their day-to-day support tasks and quickly switch gears to determine all places Log4J is utilized.
Log4J is hard to pinpoint, and IT teams must apply remedies to high-risk areas. Most of these high-risk areas are internet-facing. An IT team may think this is easily solved by focusing on precompiled charts that identify middleware or software designed to support programs outside an operating system. However, most teams only possess a loose understanding of server deployment related to each instance's software. In the case of a zero-day event, the significant time needed to identify each component running in the background is not something these teams are afforded.
Weak patches and human error can act as doorways to internal systems. It is relatively easy to argue that if there are zero vulnerable applications hosted on the internet, a bad actor has zero pathways to your internal network. But one successful phishing attack on a weak patch can change all of that. And while a firewall does prevent malicious programs from penetrating your defenses, it cannot compensate for an inadequate patching program.
Preparedness and protection are the best way to avoid an attack, but as noted earlier, zero-day events give IT teams little time to react.
Vulnerability scanners, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) all do a reasonably good job of identifying and isolating threats and any network components that may be exposed. However, these tools also require much maintenance, taking valuable time and resources away from internal IT teams.
Simply having a cybersecurity infrastructure in place will not suffice. IT teams must make a concentrated effort to configure defensive measures appropriately and ensure they are continuously optimized.
For example, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) come with the added challenge of encryption in transit. IT and security departments must consistently load decryption keys into IPS security controls to receive their benefit. Improper or inconsistent encryption upgrades or configurations can easily create a false sense of security. Alerts on non-encrypted traffic may arise while encrypted traffic is ignored.
Staying on top of encryption while considering all the security toolsets that must adapt to those changes is a lot of work.
The excellent news for Log4J on Apache is that the fix is not overly complicated. Once the exploitation is found and isolated, IT security teams can quickly resolve the problem with little effort. The challenge is all the resources it takes to uncover each area the bug may exist in any given environment.
At MEDHOST, our MEDHOST Direct clients sleep easier knowing MEDHOST development operations, security, and infrastructure teams react quickly to harden the cybersecurity defenses surrounding our applications and tools while mitigating the effects of potential problems. Our trusted and knowledgeable cybersecurity security professionals manage the entire recovery and security process with little to no effort on the client's side.
We also offer a service that includes managing and maintaining MEDHOST applications for organizations that host their EHR on-premises. Regularly scheduled status updates with our clients and their IT teams are another essential feature of our cloud-based and managed services. In these meetings, we offer complete transparency into our strategy for mitigating the effects of any potential cyber threats and the continued development of our protective measures.
To learn more about how MEDHOST protects their hospitals from cyber threats and reduces its impact on their operations, please contact your MEDHOST Customer Success Executive.
This article was originally published by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Healthcare technology companies often turn to AWS to help them accelerate their clinical and business objectives. MEDHOST has provided enterprise information technology and electronic health record (EHR) solutions to full-service community hospitals for more than 35 years. Today, healthcare facilities nationwide partner with MEDHOST to enhance patient care and operational excellence with clinical and financial solutions, including an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST recently announced that they’re migrating all their EHR data to AWS to meet their compliance and analytics needs. This post discusses how MEDHOST uses AWS to give patients easier access to their health data while bringing advanced analytics and insights to clinicians.
The 21st Century Cures Act, designed to give patients and healthcare providers secure access to health information, has timelines requiring healthcare organizations to provide access to patient data through FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). MEDHOST needed to help their over 1,000 healthcare facility customers be compliant, but standing up and managing a FHIR server that can scale on demand is challenging for individual healthcare facilities. During the planning stages for enabling Cures Act compliance, MEDHOST realized that by enabling FHIR functionality on AWS, they could also take advantage of the ever-growing AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services to provide advanced analytics and unlock insights from their structured and unstructured clinical data (such as clinical notes). MEDHOST aimed to enable FHIR and analytics for customers by the end of 2021 and began working closely with their AWS team in 2020 to realize that vision.
The first thing MEDHOST did was begin contributing to the open-source project FHIR Works on AWS. FHIR Works on AWS is a new AWS Solutions Implementation with an open-source software toolkit that can create a FHIR interface over existing healthcare applications and data. MEDHOST began meeting regularly with AWS Interoperability and FHIR experts to carve out a path for enabling FHIR R4 APIs. In parallel to this, MEDHOST also began working with AWS Data Lab Specialists and the newest HIPAA-eligible service for storing and analyzing clinical data, Amazon HealthLake, to explore the built-in medical comprehension Amazon HealthLake offers.
The AWS Data Lab program is an accelerated joint engineering engagement between a team of customer builders and AWS technical resources to create tangible deliverables. The Data Lab Program has two offerings: a Design Lab and a Build Lab. The Build Lab is a 2-to-5-day intensive build by a team of customer builders with guidance from an AWS Data Lab Solutions Architect. The Design Lab is a new offering for customers who need a real-world architecture recommendation based on AWS expertise but aren’t yet ready to build.
MEDHOST engaged with the AWS Data Lab team to build a working prototype of their end-to-end data pipeline. In pre-lab calls leading up to the lab, the lab's scope was discussed, several architectures were proposed, and the target state architecture was built. For the Build Lab prototype, the team used select FHIR resource types with both structured and unstructured data.
The following diagram illustrates the overall architecture.
During the Data Lab, a sample dataset of structured EHR resource types was ingested in real-time to MEDHOST’s platform in AWS through Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK). The incoming Kafka payload in FHIR R4 format was loaded into Amazon DynamoDB (via FHIR Works on AWS) and Amazon HealthLake using AWS Lambda. The MEDHOST team then made test API calls to ensure the integrity of the data that was loaded. Next, unstructured clinical notes were ingested as DocumentReference resource types into Amazon HealthLake. Because Amazon HealthLake has built-in medical comprehension for DocumentReference types, MEDHOST automatically derived ICD-10 codes, diagnoses, medications, RxNorm, and other medical attributes from the unstructured data within the patients’ health records.
After all resource types were indexed, structured, and appended to Amazon HealthLake, MEDHOST exported the augmented FHIR resources to Amazon S3 in ndjson format, where an AWS Glue crawler job was created to crawl the data and build an AWS Glue Data Catalog. With the table cataloged, Amazon Athena can query all the clinical data using standard SQL. This allowed the clinical data to be easily searched, with multiple resource types joined together for full insights of patients within their data store. MEDHOST plans to build ML-based visualizations on this enhanced medical data for more accurate insights and provide clinicians with tools for predicting patient outcomes.
One of the key aspects immediately valuable to MEDHOST is the serverless nature of their architecture. FHIR Works on AWS, using Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB, allows you to scale as needed while only paying for the compute used. As an open-source project, FHIR Works on AWS also gives MEDHOST the option to customize the actual workings of the project to meet their needs. The most critical functionality that MEDHOST needed for their requirements was multi-tenancy, allowing their API layer to support multiple customers from a central deployment.
Instead of building their entire FHIR server from scratch, the MEDHOST team could use FHIR Works on AWS and only build the extra functionality needed. Similarly, Amazon HealthLake, being fully managed and built to scale on-demand, also automates running medical comprehension on unstructured data without MEDHOST worrying about building and maintaining complex services, servers, and data transformation pipelines. The service makes all insights immediately searchable, so MEDHOST can query their clinical data and the derived insights without having to worry about the complex underlying infrastructure. The architecture, and the AWS services they use with their EHR data, allow MEDHOST to focus resources on their core business, provide additional capabilities for their healthcare customers, and meet their 21st Century Cures Act requirements.
MEDHOST used its experience with AWS to kick-start and integrate new AWS features with its existing platform. This has given MEDHOST a huge head start toward meeting their compliance requirements and opened other options that might not have been possible before. With Amazon HealthLake and FHIR Works on AWS, MEDHOST can serve customers by creating a compliant FHIR data store in days with integrated natural language processing and analytics to improve hospital operational efficiency and provide better patient care. For healthcare customers looking to provide better access to clinical data, with integrated AI and ML, and a need to innovate faster, AWS encourages you to start exploring Amazon HealthLake and FHIR Works on AWS today.
Daniel Ness is a Solutions Architect supporting several AWS healthcare customers in the Southeast US. He specializes in serverless and blockchain areas and loves to help customers build on AWS.
Arun Regunathan is a Data Lab Architect at AWS. He works with customers to understand their use case, architect a solution, and build a working prototype in the AWS Data Lab in four days. He is passionate about big data and enjoys working with customers on their data and analytics use cases.
Brian Warwick is a Solutions Architect supporting global AWS Partners who build healthcare solutions on AWS. Brian is passionate about helping customers leverage the latest in technology to transform the healthcare industry.
Pandian Velayutham is the Senior Director of Engineering at MEDHOST.
This article was originally published by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
MEDHOST has been providing enterprise information technology systems to full-service community hospitals for more than 35 years. In addition to offering a robust solution at an affordable price, our longevity may be attributed to our commitment to supplying customers with the most practicable technology available.
MEDHOST’s multi-tenant cloud-based EHR solution migration with AWS benefits our customers everywhere, specifically those in rural and community settings and in connection with improved patient wellness. This blog will give readers a snapshot of our journey during these years of collaboration with AWS and what our future looks like.
We started working with AWS over seven years ago. Our initial cloud product was a new multi-tenant patient portal to meet requirements of the initial stages of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Meaningful Use program. This quickly expanded into a three-prong approach: MEDHOST committed to developing new products in the cloud; expanding and enhancing clinical modules with an industry-leading interface architected for an eventual “lift and shift” to the cloud; and developing common cloud-based services across our product lines.
Our strategy was not only designed to provide customers with the best products possible, but it also recognized that technology markets follow a predictable path to maturity and price declines. MEDHOST needed a cloud services partner that could provide the scale necessary for the long-term. AWS provides an array of tools to support our efforts, which we are able to utilize for foundational components as well as in continued innovation.
Digital transformation in the healthcare industry has been accelerated by the COVID pandemic, consumer technology awareness, physicians’ technology adoption, cloud availability, and network expansion in rural areas. MEDHOST is working on several digital transformation efforts to help address physician burnout, operational optimization by artificial intelligence (AI), remote monitoring for touchless care, analytical solutions for making informed decisions within hospital setup, reduction of onboarding time with cloud-based solutions, and efficient/low-cost solutions by adopting to open standard platform.
MEDHOST is especially focused on providing industry-leading technology to the rural market at an affordable cost. MEDHOST conducts Advisory Group sessions that include MEDHOST subject matter experts and solution users from our customer organizations, including rural health. These sessions help MEDHOST understand user workflow journey, which helps in the digital transformation process. One initiative to come out of this is an ambient listening EHR solution that provides more time for the physician to spend with a patient, rather than spending time on the keyboard. The ambient listening EHR solution uses Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend to help decrease physician keyboard time and focus on quality time with patient care.
The healthcare industry is challenged with providing patient healthcare data through API for meeting 21st Century Cures Act requirements. MEDHOST has chosen FHIR Works on AWS, an open source software toolkit, to provide cloud based multi-tenant scalable solution. Hospital IT systems face extreme difficulty in managing this solution on data center. By having a cloud-based solution, it takes away the operational challenges and also enables hospital IT systems to expand the solution based on future need. MEDHOST combines its healthcare domain knowledge with the deep technology skills of AWS by actively contributing to the AWS open source serverless multi-tenant FHIR server. FHIR API interface truly enables the patient to own their own data and consume it in real time. This not only helps the patient directly, but also expands the provider’s ability to adopt fast changing technologies for mobile applications. MEDHOST strongly believes that FHIR API will accelerate interoperability within healthcare systems.
Innovation is a core component of MEDHOST values. We host a yearly MEDHOST Hackathon event, innovation labs with AWS, and continued experiments that keep our focus on bringing quick solutions to our customers. Having multi-tenant cloud-based solutions will help us experiment more, and spend more time on technology advancements like machine learning, analytical solutions, telehealth, ambient listening EHR, mobile friendly applications, and voice-based consumer applications through Amazon Alexa. The continued innovation and healthcare-specific services of AWS help us keep our innovation going at MEDHOST.
To learn more about MEDHOST, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Expanded performance to create even smoother bi-directional transition of care for community hospitals.
FRANKLIN, Tenn., March 16, 2021 – MEDHOST®, a leading EHR (electronic health record) and healthcare IT solutions provider, is now offering an enhanced care coordination solution, YourCare Continuum®, to help healthcare communities manage patient care coordination and transitions with greater efficiency. This solution will enable even smoother interoperability between hospitals and the clinics in their networks, driving more positive clinician and patient experiences while maintaining current ambulatory investments.
“The integrated system of care has come to community hospitals; however, IT interoperability remains one of the top challenges to effectively executing a hospital’s ambulatory strategy,” said Bill Anderson, Chairman and CEO at MEDHOST. “With YourCare Continuum, our customers can resolve these challenges and streamline care coordination without having to sacrifice performance or add costs by replacing disparate IT systems.”
The new enhancements allow hospitals to provide interoperable scheduling, orders and results management, and data access across the continuum of care. This enhanced patient care coordination across providers promotes a seamless and efficient patient experience and can help alleviate financial loss resulting from patient leakage and readmission penalties.
“Patient and clinician needs will continue to evolve, quite rapidly at times, as we have seen,” added Anderson. “We are here to help our customers adapt to those changes in ways that won’t hinder their core purpose. This enhanced version of YourCare Continuum reflects that mission.”
About MEDHOST
MEDHOST has been providing products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for over 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities are partnering with MEDHOST and enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical and financial solutions, which includes an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST also offers a comprehensive emergency department information system with business and reporting tools. Additionally, its unparalleled support and cloud solutions make it easy to focus on what’s important for healthcare facilities: their patients and business. Connect with MEDHOST on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Samra Khan
Senior Marketing Manager
615-761-1000, ext. 2119
samra.khan@medhost.com
Arkansas Surgical Hospital has extended its partnership with MEDHOST to include the cloud platform EHR
FRANKLIN, Tenn., September 02, 2020 – Arkansas Surgical Hospital, and MEDHOST, a leading EHR (electronic health record) and healthcare IT solutions provider, have extended their partnership to include the MEDHOST cloud platform EHR. This addition is intended to enhance the hospital’s performance and stability. Furthermore, the cloud platform will significantly alleviate pressure on Arkansas Surgical Hospital’s internal technology team while offering superior data security.
Arkansas Surgical Hospital’s success comes from their primary focus to return the patients back home so they are able to do what they love again. MEDHOST cloud platform EHR allows facility clinicians and staff to focus on the delivery of quality patient care partnered with a more secure, reliable, and cost-effective solution. Additionally, the surgical hospital is proud to offer patients an enriched hospital experience by keeping patients informed and engaged outside the four walls of the hospital with MEDHOST patient and provider portal, a digital patient management solution.
“Having a stable and secure solution for our EHR is critical and is enhanced with a partner who truly works with us so we can focus on providing exceptional care,” said Brian Fowler, CEO at the Arkansas Surgical Hospital. “The implementation process went smoothly, and we couldn’t be happier with how the whole transition turned out. We are looking forward to the benefits that the cloud platform will bring to us.”
“At MEDHOST, we take pride in providing cost-effective, secure, and scalable solutions to hospitals nationwide,” said Bill Anderson, Chairman and CEO at MEDHOST. “MEDHOST’s cloud platform will provide substantial security to the Arkansas Surgical Hospital’s EHR along with expert system management. We look forward to our extended and continued partnership with them to support their goal to deliver excellent patient care.”
About Arkansas Surgical Hospital
Arkansas Surgical Hospital is a leader in orthopedic and spine surgery located in North Little Rock. These experienced surgeons have a disciplined focus on safety and a total commitment to the care and comfort of patients and their families, resulting in excellent surgical outcomes.
About MEDHOST
MEDHOST has been providing products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for over 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities are partnering with MEDHOST and enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical and financial solutions, which include an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST also offers a comprehensive emergency department information system with business and reporting tools. Additionally, its unparalleled support and cloud platform solutions make it easy to focus on what’s important for healthcare facilities: their patients and business. Connect with MEDHOST on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Click here to view this on Newswire
Media Contact
Samra Khan
Senior Brand Manager
615-761-1000, ext. 2119
Samra.khan@medhost.com
A hospital’s ability to accurately communicate and coordinate care is a key part of disaster preparedness for rural and urban healthcare facilities, states The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
In many natural disaster scenarios, rural communities and the hospitals that support those communities can often experience a disadvantage in communicating and coordinating care. A rural community’s remote location, coupled with other possible factors like dated travel and communication infrastructures, pose barriers most urban hospitals may not need to consider.
All circumstances considered rural providers should take a closer look at how EHR hosting can help secure operations, and more importantly, increase data integrity.
Rural hospitals can start effectively communicating patient data by working with an EHR hosting partner. Employing a third party to host an EHR system can provide an extra level of disaster protection for all healthcare providers, especially those located in rural settings. According to Jason Hebden, MEDHOST Senior Manager of Managed Integration Services, rural healthcare providers should expect an EHR host to offer the following benefits:
1. Dedicated system management that removes pressure from internal IT staff.
From a general operations perspective, and even in times of disaster, when behind-the-scenes EHR tasks are managed externally, internal IT personnel can focus on more pertinent issues.
2. Improved recovery speed.
Having hosted EHR servers can usually result in faster recovery. During a disaster, responsibilities for full EHR system recovery lie with the hosted service provider. Keep in mind that throughout and after a disaster, a hospital’s dedicated IT personnel are likely to have additional system outages taking up their time. A multitude of competing internal IT needs can delay EHR recovery.
3. Remote data backup, storage, and resilience.
If a server room is flooded or destroyed in a fire and the data is not backed up in a remote location—on physical media, in the cloud, or replicated to a dual physical data center—that data will be lost indefinitely. Losing access to patient data during a disaster is something hospitals should avoid at all costs. Once the local infrastructure is restored, rolling back to a source that was not impacted by a natural disaster event will save a hospital significant time and resources during recovery.
4. Redundancy in connectivity.
In some instances, a natural disaster can damage a rural community’s communication infrastructure. An EHR host may leverage multiple connection points to improve the probability of maintaining successful connectivity within a fragile network. If one point of connection fails, there will be another point to take its place.
5. Risk reduction.
Rural health providers’ disaster planning directed toward patient data security and accessibility is a matter of calculated risk. Healthcare data systems contained and managed on-premise require a good deal of resources during a disaster and are at even more risk, especially during times of uncertainty.
An EHR host can help a hospital save resources, lower risk, and also provide clear and documented answers to the following questions:
Rural areas that find themselves vulnerable to natural disasters and other potential mass casualty events must take a more communal approach to their disaster preparedness and response, states Paudel Bishow, the Chief Hospitalist at Holy Rosary Healthcare, a critical access hospital (CAH) in Montana. A community-centric reliance on fragile local infrastructures is one of the top reasons rural hospitals should consider offsite hosting and management for their EHR. When local networks fail, rural healthcare providers, need reliable backup architecture.
Bishow’s 25-bed CAH is located in Miles City, MT, 145 miles from the nearest major urban area—Billing, MT. In both emergency and disaster scenarios, Bishow notes that precise coordination between EMS providers is integral to ensuring patients get the specific level of care they need. He notes one of the best ways to achieve effective care coordination with EMS and other providers is through an integrated EHR that can ensure data integrity.
Geography and infrastructural inadequacies can place rural communities at a disadvantage during natural disasters, meaning they often need a bigger commitment from their community and providers.
Hospitals are the cornerstones for many rural communities. Leading up to, during, and after natural disasters, rural providers need to be confident in their EHR’s ability to help them effectively serve that community. Losing a locally managed EHR and the patient data stored within can create patient safety issues and additional risks. Recovering data from equipment that may have been severely damaged or procuring new equipment to restore data from offsite tape backups is a massive undertaking for hospital IT staff.
A hosted EHR solution can be an added layer of protection and sustainability for critical patient data systems. By taking the burden of EHR disaster response and recovery off the hospital’s hands, an EHR host can help rural healthcare providers more effectively care for people impacted by natural disasters.
