April 2017

Thoughts From Our President

The opioid crisis has raised issues regarding the responsibilities of hospitals and physicians to balance the need to manage pain with the risks of overprescribing.  While there has been attention focused on the “frequent flyers” that present in multiple emergency departments, our industry is starting to identify behaviors that have contributed to this crisis.

If your hospital is considering reviewing its current practices regarding pain medication, there are two white papers on MEDITECH’s website worth reviewing.

The first is from the MEDITECH Nurse Advisory Committee entitled Strategies and Challenges: Managing the Opioid Crisis. This provides several specific suggestions from nursing leaders on strategies they employed.

The second is How the MEDITECH EHR Helps Meet CARA (Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act) 2016 Provisions, with specific guidance for each MEDITECH platform.

Although these were both published last year, we believe some of you may have missed these and would find them useful. We also believe that a focused effort on this issue will start to make a difference. Let us know if you find either of these useful.

John Haffty, President
Navin, Haffty & Associates

Notable MEDITECH Capabilities that Support Population Health

In our past three newsletters we provided information on MEDITECH’s Analytics and Population Health capabilities, including an in-depth review of their Business and Clinical Analytics (BCA) product last month. There are several significant tools available in other 6.1 products that are worth noting. Here are some points to consider:
 
Surveillance (within the Quality and Surveillance application)

• Maintain an organization-wide watch list of patients being monitored for quality measure or “at risk” conditions
• Predictive surveillance capabilities for proactively identifying and monitoring patients within the IDN who qualify for clinical quality measures; qualify for one or multiple specific surveillance profiles, e.g., VTE, sepsis or pneumonia; are vulnerable to high-risk conditions; or who meet other specified criteria

Chronic Disease Registries for High Cost Population and Co-Morbidity Management

• Patient registries available in 6.1 Web Ambulatory appear to provide equivalent capabilities to competitors’ chronic disease registries. Patient registries provide full listings of patients from across the care network based on a specific set of conditions
• Patient registries allow a site to:
  • Create and manage groups of patients based on conditions (such as diabetes or hypertension) or other factors (such as overdue immunizations or elapsed time between wellness visits or preventive screenings)
  • Follow up with and monitor patients after emergency department visits to reduce avoidable readmissions
  • Steer patients to low cost locations for care based on patient registry membership
  • Create patient work lists (subsets of patient registries by criteria, e.g., “diabetics with HbA1c levels over 7% who have not been seen in 60 days), which:
    • Auto-populate by diagnosis and rules and can be filtered by payer or insurance and by specific lab, medication or other clinical information
    • Assist in contract management by helping physicians and hospitals focus on quality factors; for example, facilitating the capture and reporting on quality measures by specific items that vary from contract to contract, including Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) reporting requirements
    • Automatically send color-coded notifications to providers for abnormal values and overdue health maintenance
  • Act upon registry data by placing orders, documenting care, updating records or logging patient calls
• Registries and worklists are automatically updated as conditions change
• MEDITECH provides some pre-built registries

Wellness Registries for Organizing Preventive Care

• Patient registries available in 6.1 Web Ambulatory appear to provide equivalent capabilities to competitors’ wellness registries. Patient registries provide full listings of patients from across the care network based on a specific set of conditions. Patient registries allow a site to:
  • Create and manage groups of patients based on conditions (such as diabetes, hypertension, etc.) or other factors (such as overdue immunizations or elapsed time between wellness visits or preventive screenings)
  • Create patient work lists (subsets of registries by criteria) which:
    • Track patients by group to ensure patients meet payor specific clinical guidelines for health maintenance/preventive care, e.g., annual checkups or flu shots
    • Allow automatic notifications to providers when patients are overdue on health maintenance
• Registries and worklists are automatically updated as conditions change

Portal Integration for User-entered or Home Device Collection

• Patient-generated health data are now able to be integrated via the portal
• MEDITECH can pull specific discrete patient-generated health data elements into the patient record via Validic. All patient-generated health data for patients who are on care plans and are under physician-directed monitoring are imported into the patient record. Providers can set threshold values by patient and receive notifications when monitored patient data are outside of those thresholds
• Below are notable integrations via Validic:
• Accu-Chek by Roche
• Apple HealthKit
• Fitbit
• Johnson & Johnson
• Withings
• MEDITECH has many direct integrations with vendor providers of patient-generated health data

Physician Care Manager and Patient Care System

• Provides the ability to send automatic alerts to physicians and nurses when patient-specific thresholds for dangerous values are exceeded or specifically-defined outlier test results are returned. Alert notices are color-coded based on severity and automatically triggered based on physician preferences, which can also be patient‐specific alerts and sent via email or alphanumeric pager. When another provider views a message, he or she can review and file the suggested orders with a simple mouse click

We have dedicated a lot of space to MEDITECH’s Population Health capabilities, as we believe many of you want to know more about it. If you have any questions, contact your MEDITECH sales rep, but also feel free to contact us with any questions at info@navinhaffty.com.

Navin, Haffty & Associates Expands Application Support Services

One of the challenges facing some hospitals is the shortage of hiring experienced MEDITECH applications talent. Most hospitals are tasked each year with ever-increasing priorities and demands for services, while being unable to add new positions or find qualified candidates for those positions that are approved. 
 
One approach to consider is to leverage your internal resources for higher value work and consider using an outside firm, such as NHA, to cover routine user support needs. NHA is delivering these services to a growing number of hospitals, ranging from limited support for an individual application to full backfill support. We customize a solution for each client’s unique needs and leverage a broad team of application specialists for both MEDITECH and related non-MEDITECH products, allowing your staff to focus on your hospital’s highest priorities.
 
There are many reasons why an organization may choose to offload application support:

• Allowing your staff to focus on key initiatives and priorities
• Peak demand needs, such as upgrades and migrations, that last for a few months
• During mergers and acquisitions
• Short-term vacancies for applications specialists (both planned and unplanned)
• Experienced full-time candidates are difficult to locate
• Workload cannot be handled by current staff but cannot justify additional in-house FTEs

If you are interested in more information, contact us at info@navinhaffty.com.

KLAS Comments

Recent KLAS Comments from March 2017:

“Navin, Haffty & Associates has the strongest bench for MEDITECH, bar none. They understand MEDITECH. The only negative thing is that they are slightly more expensive than some of the other firms, but in the end, we get what we pay for.” – Executive

“I have a direct line to a certain executive from Navin, Haffty & Associates. He is always at the other end of the phone. He is amazing. He does a wonderful job with prioritizing. I know I am not the only game in town for him, but when I get on the phone with him, he makes me feel as though I am. He understands our site. He listens. He understands our challenges. When we take the time to explain to him what we need in a resource and under what constructs, he usually nails those instructions.” – Executive

Please note selected commentaries may not represent the whole of provider sentiment related to this product or service. For a complete view, visit KLASresearch.com

Quick Notes

• Congratulations to our friends at Northwestern Medical Center, St. Albans, Vermont, as they have gone LIVE with MEDITECH’s first 6.1.6 Web Acute implementation. NHA is pleased to have been their implementation partner and is already sharing lessons learned with our other active 6.1.6 Web Acute clients. If you are planning to attend MUSE, Northwestern’s project manager, Jodi Frei, will be presenting on their journey to 6.1.6.

• Congratulations to our friends at University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health, Bel Air, Maryland for their successful 6.0 to 6.1 upgrade. NHA is pleased to have been a part of this project.

• NHA is pleased to announce that the following organizations have chosen to partner with us on their upcoming projects:
  • • Fort Madison Community Hospital, Fort Madison, Iowa – 6.0 to 6.1
    • Salina Regional Health Center, Salina, Kansas – C/S to 6.1
    • Woman’s Hospital, Baton Rouge, Louisiana – 6.1 Preparedness Assessment
    • Memorial Hospital and Manor, Bainbridge, Georgia – interim CIO
    • Memorial Hospital of Converse County, Douglas, Wyoming – 6.1 Web Ambulatory project support

MUSE 2017

The 2017 International MUSE Conference will be held at the Gaylord Texan Resort, Dallas, Texas from May 30-June 2. NHA will be exhibiting at booth 730.  As you make your plans for MUSE, let us know if you want to meet with one of us and make sure to stop by and say hello. To schedule a meeting, contact David LaFontaine at dlafontaine@navinhaffty.com. 

NHA will be presenting with Halifax Health on two topics:

Calendar of Events

Webinar: The Key to Quality Oncology Management
April 13, 2:00 PM (Eastern)
Integrated oncology tools in the EHR are essential to address the complex coordination needs of cancer patients. MEDITECH’s Oncology Management solution provides clinicians with immediate access to each patient’s complete EHR, so they can deliver targeted, patient-centered care that stretches across the continuum.
 
Webinar: Quality and Surveillance
April 26, 2:00 PM (Eastern)
This high-level demonstration will show you how MEDITECH’s Quality and Surveillance solution monitors risk and quality throughout your organization — leading to enhanced patient safety and positive patient outcomes.
 
Webinar: MEDITECH’s Web Acute
April 27, 2:00 PM (Eastern)
This high-level demonstration of MEDITECH’s Web EHR showcases the evolution of this bold functionality within the inpatient space.
 
2017 Nurse and Home Care Forum
The 2017 Nurse and Home Care Forum will be held June 14-16 at MEDITECH’s Foxborough, Massachusetts facility. Click here for more information or to register.

NHA is Hiring

If you are interested in consulting, consider joining us. NHA continues to need excellent MEDITECH specialists and for the third year in a row, we have been named to the Top 100 “Best Places to Work” by Modern Healthcare magazine.

If you are interested, please contact us at recruiting@navinhaffty.com or call us at (855) 309-9334. See what positions are currently available by visiting the NHA Career’s page.

Please note that at this time, we are only able to consider those able to travel up to 80% of the time (also employees from MEDITECH and our clients cannot be considered).

Client Job Board

If you are interested in exploring new positions at other organizations, visit the client job board section of our website. This is a free service of NHA to the MEDITECH community. Currently, there are many postings from MEDITECH organizations. If you or a colleague are interested, check out what’s open.

If you would like to include your organization’s listing on the NHA website, please email Katie Kelly at kkelly@navinhaffty.com. Please note that as this is a courtesy to the MEDITECH community, we will not accept postings from recruiting companies.