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With New Year’s Day—and our 40th anniversary— just around the corner, it feels both timely and appropriate to reflect on how we got here.
In this post, we will revisit the pivotal events that have transformed us into a national ally in community health.
The year was 1984, a time when neon colors were in vogue, synthesizers had helped Van Halen “Jump” to the top of the charts, and the world of technology was on the brink of a revolution. Tech giants were yet to rise, and innovation was emerging from garages rather than corporate boardrooms.
MEDHOST started as a small company at a kitchen table with the mission of providing financial and accounting solutions to community hospitals. Using desktop computers like the System/34 and System/36, we automated critical processes to meet the growing demand for advanced capabilities among these providers.
As time went on, the business grew, and soon came to be known as Healthcare Management Systems, or simply HMS, offering a flagship product called Monitor. One year after Monitor’s release, HMS landed its first hospital. A year later, the first multi-facility corporate client.
The needs of community hospitals fundamentally changed with the passage of the HITECH act, which required these providers to have a full bevy of clinical applications, and that doctors use these applications. A decade later, HMS acquired MEDHOST, a Texas-based emergency department information system (EDIS) provider.
Under the unified MEDHOST banner, the company embarked on a journey to revamp its applications, prioritizing industry-leading, user-centric interfaces. The company also invested heavily in services to help customers use these new products, including support, implementation, and cloud hosting.
In the years that followed, MEDHOST ascended to prominence in the healthcare IT sector, and remains a trusted partner in community healthcare nationwide.
Click here to watch a video that showcases MEDHOST's commitment to innovation and its role as a dedicated partner in community healthcare.
Debates about the ideal method to prepare a Thanksgiving turkey are common in many households—whether it's traditional slow roasting, a wet or dry brine for added moisture, or the risk vs. reward calculations of deep frying. Similarly, in the realm of hospital EHR (Electronic Health Records) systems, there are numerous approaches to deployment.
MEDHOST, with its extensive experience gained over decades and more than a thousand EHR implementations, has refined a unique formula for the successful deployment of EHR systems.
For hospitals looking to adopt a new EHR system, consider these essential strategies for the best outcomes:
Initially, healthcare providers must collaborate closely with the electronic health record deployment team to establish clear expectations. This level of project management involves discussing objectives, capabilities, timelines, current workflows, and other factors that might affect the rollout.
Top EHR vendors know that neglecting this step can lead to delays, training gaps, patient care concerns, adoption issues, additional costs, and other challenges that could significantly disrupt the long-term success of the project.
At MEDHOST, the initial stage of all deployments involves in-depth conversations with the hospital staff to devise a tailored strategy for EHR adoption. Our client base includes various types of healthcare facilities, each with unique goals and expectations, such as behavioral health centers, ambulatory practices, community hospitals, post-acute care facilities, and large health networks.
The primary objectives usually encompass:
By thoroughly understanding these aspects, we ensure the implementation plan is customized to meet the specific needs of each facility.
MEDHOST involves the executive team in these plans to manage expectations regarding time, cost, resource allocation, and space requirements. Each of our comprehensive system deployments is also overseen by an executive representative from MEDHOST to maintain open communication channels.
Once the plan is agreed upon, we begin the actual implementation.
Given the diversity in healthcare facility types and goals, a uniform approach to electronic health record deployment is rarely effective.
It’s important that the chosen EHR system aligns well with the specific needs and resources of your facility.
MEDHOST emphasizes the importance of adaptability in their approach, acknowledging the varied types of hospitals they encounter.
From the initial stages of discovery and system configuration to training, testing, and finally going live, the focus remains on your organization's smart goals. In addition, MEDHOST recognizes that hospital staff often have ongoing duties, and their involvement in new technology deployment should not impede these responsibilities.
The success of an EHR deployment hinges on having the right team. This means choosing a health information technology provider whose team is comprised of professionals with direct experience, such as nurses, pharmacists, and departmental directors.
MEDHOST prides itself on its team's extensive clinical, financial, and operational experience within hospitals. A significant portion of the staff involved in deploying nursing solutions are seasoned professionals with direct hospital experience, which aids in creating a more effective and empathetic implementation process.
Finally, differentiating between a vendor and a partner in the EHR market is a critical step. A vendor concludes a sale and moves on, whereas a partner remains involved throughout the entire electronic health record deployment process and beyond, working side by side with you.
MEDHOST stands out in its commitment to ongoing collaboration with clients, from assigning executive sponsors for each project to regular updates and feedback loops.
By adhering to these best practices when selecting an EHR partner, you'll be setting the table for a successful implementation.
Learn more about how the MEDHOST implementations team can set you up for continued success. Email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
All too often, hospitals and vendors want to accelerate the implementation of a new EHR solution, hoping to capitalize on the latest benefits as soon as possible. But a rushed EHR implementation can quickly work against a facility by creating friction among the hospital staff.
To reduce the chances an implementation will cause disruptions to care and operations, MEDHOST strives to gain an intimate understanding of organizational needs, especially in a community-based setting. We make it a point to sit down with our customers and adjust our implementation methodologies to address these unique challenges.
Our approach includes:
In this blog, we’ll unpack each of these strategies and show how they can help your facility to support modern care modalities without disrupting workflows.
No one likes having a bunch of guys with visitor badges working out of a supply closet.
Our centralized implementation command center, operating around the clock, ensures smooth coordination and communication between internal and external stakeholders without the need for excessive onsite personnel. This approach minimizes end-user impact, tracks progress, and facilitates efficient issue resolution, keeping hospital operations running seamlessly.
Most importantly, a strong command center speeds the escalation of any issues that may arise, ensuring quick and effective resolutions.
Clear communication is essential in any healthcare technology implementation. When working with a hometown provider or a smaller hospital, it’s especially important to get a lay of the land, have those crucial conversations, and understand the challenges these facilities face before plugging in a new system.
During the pandemic, we demonstrated our agility and adaptability by adjusting our communication strategies to overcome limitations posed by in-person interactions and varying hospital quarantine policies. This flexibility allowed us to continue supporting implementations and patient care while ensuring everyone's safety.
In community-based hospitals, financial and clinical parties often have conflicting priorities that can impede progress. Our implementations experts, equipped with hands-on experience, foster collaboration and empathetically prioritize requests and deliverables. By providing 24/7 access to subject matter experts, we enable efficient change management and issue resolution, facilitating forward momentum without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Ready to experience an EHR that works for your care community?
Learn more about how the MEDHOST implementations team can set you up for continued success. Email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Maximizing the long-term returns of an EHR investment is directly tied to the quality of that solution’s clinical adoption. A hospital’s best opportunity to encourage adoption and advocation of an EHR is at the early stages, during the implementation of that new solution, and throughout training.
A multi-phase approach to EHR implementations-or any clinical-facing healthcare IT solution-is one of the most effective ways to ensure adoption and positive results.
The below infographic offers an example of what such a layered, multi-phase timeline might look like.
All too often, hospitals and vendors want to accelerate the implementation of a new EHR solution, hoping to capitalize on the latest benefits as soon as possible. When in fact, a rushed EHR implementation can quickly work against a facility by fomenting resistance within the hospital’s user base.
A phased approach to clinical adoption dramatically reduces resistance and the risks associated with accelerated implementations. By layering certain rollout phases, you can create a strong foundation for success that gives clinical, financial, and operational staff time to become acquainted with the new solution.
To learn about how the MEDHOST implementations team can set you up for continued success, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Creating and implementing relevant clinical documentation standards is one of the most critical steps in adopting or optimizing a hospital’s electronic health records system (EHR). An essential part of any new clinical implementation—not overshadowed by the solution itself—documentation and content play integral roles in a hospital’s clinical and operational efficiency.
This article discusses a few things a hospital should consider when setting up clinical content and what they should expect from a knowledgeable healthcare IT implementation team.
Clinical content is a foundational element of an EHR. Notes, treatment plans, patient diagnosis care standards, test results, medication administration—all these and more are guided by uniform documentation. Thus, this entire content library must be given the utmost attention.
From a clinical perspective, nurses and physicians can perform with more efficiency and accuracy when they have a reliable solution for the entry, storage, and retrieval of evidence-based clinical content.
Operationally, setting clear and relevant clinical documentation standards is critical because of its close ties to improving the value of care. A better value often means reduced costs and maximized reimbursements.
Setting up clinical content requires collaboration from the facility and the EHR vendor. By ensuring this process includes critical decision-makers from both parties, vendor and facility can make sure documentation meets each specific need—clinically, operationally, and from a regulatory perspective.
An EHR vendor will support this process with implementation experts who have hands-on clinical experience in a best-case scenario. Putting this expertise at a hospital’s disposal enables a streamlined and informed approach to setting up clinical content.
For example, vendor and hospital users can create standardized naming conventions that don’t stray too far from previous models and make sense for specified workflows. Something as simple as uniform filenames can ease use and support a clinical team.
Also, an EHR vendor must have the expertise on hand to catch potential documentation issues that may not meet local, state, and government guidelines. It can be time-consuming for hospital staff to keep up with regulatory changes. Knowing industry standards and documentation policies is often a significant part of an implementation expert’s job. This degree of foresight will help prepare a facility to meet government guidelines such as Promoting Interoperability.
Even with the help of a skilled vendor, setting up clinical content is an intricate process. Facilities can reduce the stress clinical documentation can create by focusing on three key aspects—timeline, operations, and content governance.
Successful hospitals will work with their EHR vendor to lay out a realistic approach for setting up clinical content before a go-live event. We find the best practice is to identify and agree on any “must-have” documents or templates and use them for the first 120 days after going live.
The development of clinical content as it relates to operations entails various aspects. Every piece of documentation to be considered must address these points to avoid any operational issues in the future. They include:
Once an EHR is “live,” it is not unlikely for clinical teams to request changes to the content. At MEDHOST, we insist hospitals create clinical governance committees tasked with evaluating and prioritizing requests as they relate to your overall vision. A governance committee can also make sure any newly created documentation and roles standards follow the specified guidelines laid out before implementation.
In addition, a clinical governance committee defines the ongoing processes for clinically related content regarding—patient safety, continued education, onboarding of new staff, reviews, and maintenance. A facility can also encourage CMS guidelines like Promoting Interoperability and Appropriate Use Criteria through the governance committee.
MEDHOST takes specific care to introduce governance concepts and promote engagement within the organization.
All of the best practices and components outlined come into play during every implementation of any MEDHOST solution, whether migrating to a cloud-based EHR or adding a new revenue cycle solution. Our team of implementation experts claims decades of combined clinical experience to help hospitals find a clear pathway to standardized documentation that supports continued clinical and operational success.
To learn about how the MEDHOST implementations team can set you up for success now and into the future, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
In part one of this series, we covered two ways to set a strong foundation for a successful clinical IT implementation – identifying champions and creating metrics that will define success.
With much of the groundwork laid, the final three strategies require more action from the hospital and play critical roles closer to going live. They include driving clinical engagement, establishing clinical governance, and creating a rollout timeline.
Through strict adherence to these guidelines in collaboration with a reliable healthcare IT vendor, your hospital can better promote the adoption, usage, and optimal performance of new clinical IT solutions.
One of the biggest challenges hospitals have when implementing a new clinical IT solution is underestimating resistance to adoption. Resistance can occur up through and after go-live. Implementing new clinical tools will often be one of a hospital's most complex challenges. Preparing clinical staff for these changes is a strategic initiative that can challenge hospital leaders more than configuring features and training users.
Often, we have seen community hospitals successfully engage clinicians by providing them with unrestricted access to workstations, guides, and manuals in general staff areas like a staff lounge. Here physicians and nurses can get hands-on experience with the new solution at their own pace or schedule. This approach should remain intact well-after go-live as an educational device for new clinical staff or a demo station when updates and upgrades are applied.
Regularly communicating positive changes, implementation updates, and training events early will often help get clinicians motivated and excited about the change.
While the IT Team plays a critical role in implementing and managing a solution, a committee of hands-on clinical users can support further adoption and optimization.
Almost immediately after go-live, requests for tweaks and changes to content or additional reporting and access rights will flood the implementation team. Your clinical governance committee ensures the evaluation of each submission as part of your overall vision. Creating and following documentation and role standards will ensure appropriate clinical content following specified guidelines.
A new clinical IT solution will offer plenty of opportunities to capture and measure meaningful data. The clinical governance committee should lead the evaluation of this data to ensure its use will improve clinical usage and outcomes.
A phased approach to clinical adoption dramatically reduces resistance and the risks associated with accelerated implementations. By layering certain rollout phases, you can create a solid foundation for success that gives clinical staff time to become acquainted with the new solution.
For example, hospitals can offer staff direct access to demo the new system through super-user and end-user training times. Overlapping training for different user types heightens the opportunity for early adopters to influence and encourage others.
Successful hospitals also pursue a realistic approach for setting up clinical content in advance of the go-live event.
Implementing a new clinical IT solution is an exercise that involves learning new software tools and technologies. More importantly, it is also an exercise in learning how to incorporate those innovative technologies to strengthen the relationship between clinical teams, physicians, and patients.
The five strategies covered in parts one and two of this clinical IT implementation series require a blend of:
To find out how MEDHOST can help your team put all these characteristics into action and guide a successful implementation that results in quantifiable improvements to patient care, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Healthcare IT vendors and their community hospital partners often focus on specific go-live events to define project success, but that is just one step in the journey. The process—creating a sustainable, strategic, well-planned implementation—can contribute as much to improved patient care as the technology itself.
Based on hundreds of successful implementations with community hospitals across the country, this series covers five essential best practices community hospitals can use to maximize clinical IT implementation effectiveness.
The first strategies outlined occur well-before go-live. They involve the creation of a supportive framework and actionable goals that will help drive your implementation forward.
Selecting champions for a clinical IT solution implementation is one of the most critical steps in the entire process. In all vital hospital areas, advocates from leadership play essential roles in adoption, but the nursing and physician champions are most pivotal to your success.
A clinical informatics position will often represent the nursing champion as part of the hospital IT team. The nursing informatics role helps bridge gaps between IT and clinical staff. Thus, the clinical staff has a seat at the table for all future clinical projects.
It is relatively common practice to assume that the physician champion should be primarily tech-savvy. Still, this element is only part of the skill set to look for in a physician champion.
A physician who has earned the credibility of their peers and has a good grasp and knowledge of preferred physician workflows will have the most dramatic influence through the implementation and adoption process. The ideal physician champion speaks with a voice that carries considerable weight. When this individual has their stamp of approval on a new solution, it can make a big difference when encountering adoption opposition.
These two champions co-star in your clinical readiness analysis, which should occur as implementation begins. When the right champions lead the team, executing the change management required of a clinical IT implementation becomes much easier.
Hospitals often have a hard time articulating a single shared vision around the expected outcome of a new clinical IT implementation. Different stakeholders in the hospital may state completely different reasons for the change, ranging from obtaining federal incentive dollars to transforming patient safety.
While implementing MEDHOST solutions, we focus on facilitating conversations that help hospital partners define their visions and set specific milestones and measurements for success. By bringing all key stakeholders together—hospital administrators, nurses, physicians, IT, etc.—we create an alignment that will act as the foundation of the implementation. This alignment is essential to ensure readiness for a new clinical IT implementation.
Defining an adoption plan and key success measurements for the rollout are crucial to ensuring clinicians and physicians know how to best use the new technology. Success criteria should be attainable, straightforward, and aligned with improving care, reducing errors, and streamlining and improving clinical content.
Much like the go-live event is not a destination, but a milestone in the implementation journey, optimization of the solution should be ongoing and driven by continuous measurement. MEDHOST strives to make optimization a grassroots effort for our community hospital partners, so they can continuously transform the clinical care process for the better.
Stay tuned for part two of 5 Steps to a Successful Clinical IT Implementation, where we will discuss clinician engagement, clinical governance, and rollout planning.
If you are ready to speak now on how we can help with the implementation or optimization of your clinical IT systems, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Just as businesses around the world were required to make necessary changes to keep staff safe while combating COVID-19 exposure threats, hospitals in every care setting were required to adopt new ways of conducting business while continuing to provide quality patient care to those they serve.
These policy and procedure changes, along with staff exhaustion, brought significant challenges to the country’s community-based hospitals when the need to address EHR implementation projects emerged.
To reduce the chances an implementation will cause disruptions to care and operations, MEDHOST has always strived to gain an intimate understanding of our customer’s unique needs at every turn, especially in the community-based setting. We partner with our customers to adjust our implementations methodologies to specifically match those needs and reduce disruptions—particularly when external factors bring unexpected challenges.
The healthcare service restrictions precipitated by the pandemic created a massive interruption to care, especially in rural America.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 450 rural healthcare facilities are now operating in the red and at risk of closing states a new report from The Chartis Group. Community-based care facilities in these regions cannot afford disruptions to care no matter how big or small.
Throughout a busy cycle, and amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, MEDHOST has been able to mitigate HIT implementation disruptions through:
Centralized Control
A successful, unintrusive implementation requires a strong brain center that monitors and controls all aspects of the activation process, coordinating communication and deliverables between internal and external parties. At MEDHOST we call this our implementations command center.
The implementations command center is essential as a way to:
Most importantly, a strong command center speeds escalation of any issues that arise to the correct support structures. Expedited escalation also promotes quick and effective resolutions so hospital operations can continue to flow smoothly.
Adaptation and Flexibility
Clear communication is vital throughout an implementation of any healthcare technology. That aptitude and the ability to adapt was tested when the pandemic made in-person events and interactions challenging. Those problems multiply when varying hospital quarantine polices call for varying methods of adaptation.
One way that MEDHOST is able to navigate these issues is a constant commitment to agility supported by communication layered in a way that prevents delays, improves processes, and drives success. During the pandemic this adaptability has helped support the continuity of both implementations and care, while keeping everyone safe.
Role-Based Expertise
Financial and clinical parties may have differing priorities. Often, in a community-based hospital setting, competing views can slow implementations to a crawl. Implementations experts with hands-on experience can help promote collaboration in an empathetic way that successfully prioritizes opposing requests and deliverables.
Through 24/7 access to subject matter expertise all parties can efficiently manage change, resolve issues, and keep things moving forward in a productive manner.
The pandemic caused start-stops for many hospitals. Such external factors are part of delivering care and are often beyond most people’s control. As a trusted healthcare IT vendor, MEDHOST recognizes that implementations are one area we can control with the proper approach, adaptability, and expertise.
Many of our customers are small rural and community hospitals who cannot afford major disruptions to care – pandemic or not. To this extent, throughout the pandemic MEDHOST executed a number of successful healthcare IT implementations in a very short period of time, maintaining a high customer satisfaction rating.
To learn more about how MEDHOST implementations is designed to reduce disruptions and support the unique needs of are critical rural and community providers, please contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
In an 18-month period, amid the upheaval caused by COVID-19, MEDHOST executed a large-scale corporate healthcare IT (HIT) implementation for a customer that involved more than 20 facilities.
Our joint success would not have been possible without the direct engagement and involvement of the essential caregivers at those facilities.
In today’s increasingly challenging healthcare market, healthcare organizations are implementing more sophisticated and complex EHRs (electronic health records), with solutions spanning the continuum of care. What once was an IT driven project has become an organizational-wide campaign. In order to successfully manage and execute these implementations, clinical users must be engaged early and often. This engagement creates an understanding of how to:
One of the biggest roadblocks to a successful healthcare IT implementation project is the lack of key stakeholder involvement, more specifically, the clinician. Oftentimes, a new HIT implementation comes with changes, and some of the most difficult to embrace changes are the ones that require new workflows. This is where clinical perspectives provide the greatest value.
The clinical user possesses insights that have benefit to both the hospital and vendor. These insights inform and direct the standardization of HIT workflows and protocols to accurately reflect a clinical user’s everyday needs. When the clinical perspective is prioritized, implementations move forward with greater progress.
For example, it can be easy for both physicians and nurses to get stuck on how things used to be done. When clinicians are empowered to engage in HIT implementations—discovery meetings, workflow designs, training sessions—their energy turns from thinking about how change creates disruption, to collaborating on ways to envision a final product that works best for them, the organization, and their patients.
From my perspective as a nurse practitioner, I saw empowered clinicians demonstrate a willingness and desire to understand and engage during a recent multi-facility implementation that resulted in:
A clinical perspective is also helpful in bridging gaps in the implementation of new functionality, as well as helping coordinate the design and communication of such changes within a large clinical population.
Engaging role-based user’s and gaining an understanding of their experience during implementations is important but should also be an ongoing endeavor.
When clinical stakeholders are closely partnered with role-based specialists and account managers, together we are able to:
MEDHOST promotes an environment of trust, professionalism, and confidence with all our partners. We value clinical users’ feedback and engage them early on and often. These values put into practice help catapult implementations towards successful outcomes. The result is an effective solution that works for clinicians, simplifies processes, and minimizes disruptions
To learn more about the MEDHOST implementations and how we partner with healthcare organizations to optimize clinical, financial, and operational performance, email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Clinician burnout is a complex matter with a long history involving multiple elements.
A recent report from the Mayo clinic identified low EHR (electronic health record) usability as an ongoing key contributor to this national healthcare crisis.
When the COVID-19 pandemic significantly increased the demand for healthcare services, much of the work done to slow the rate of clinician burnout evaporated. Fewer places was this shift felt more strongly than in rural and underserved communities, where even prior to the pandemic, attracting and retaining skilled clinicians was already a constant struggle.
There are easily identifiable factors that contribute to poor EHR usability. Some EHR usability issues are symptomatic of an ever-evolving landscape of healthcare regulations. Other factors are more systemic and can be attributed to the complex design and implementation of the EHR solution itself.
MEDHOST is focused on continuously simplifying EHR workflows and implementations for optimal usability based on customer feedback.
Establishing a channel for continuous feedback from clinician users is vital. Healthcare providers and end-users must be given multiple channels for soliciting feedback.
A few of the noteworthy channels of engagement MEDHOST employs include:
Clinician feedback is frequently based on experiences with prior products and is sometimes conflicting with feedback from other clinicians. Thoughtful responses are essential in these cases to foster both continued communication and product improvement.
New features or product ideas should be designed with usability in mind focusing on minimal clicks; minimum required fields; simple page layouts; and integrated, simplified workflows. Features must also be vetted with key internal and external stakeholders at multiple stages throughout the development cycle via periodic product demos and retrospectives.
Additionally, extensive usability testing internally should be planned. At MEDHOST, these cross-departmental testing stages involve members of the EHR support and customer service teams, as their views and feedback over implementation and development have a customer perspective with value for all parties.
Product Development using Agile methodology assists in the successful design of a simplified EHR. Agile enables our engineering teams to quickly adapt to changes surfaced via the various feedback channels and supports a mission of improved EHR usability.
Lastly, alongside simplifying workflows and providing new solutions, an enhanced focus on EHR implementation is foundational for delivering a usable EHR system. A configurable solution coupled with a highly engaged implementation team helps streamline the “go-live” period for all our facilities.
Specific details of the various implementation measures enacted by MEDHOST are outlined in a past blog.
As a service to all our customers, MEDHOST continues to provide simplified solutions, balancing usability and healthcare regulations. While clinicians all over work hard to support their communities, MEDHOST remains focused on supporting the wellness of these essential workers by providing usable solutions that allow them to best serve their patients.
To learn how we can help support the well-being of your clinicians with healthcare IT solutions specified to their needs, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
