MEDITECH Rules: How to Start Optimizing and Solving Pain Points

The MEDITECH Rules Engine is one of the most powerful, underutilized, and misunderstood tools in your EMR. You can use rules to pull forward discrete data elements, reduce documentation redundancy, prevent provider burnout, enhance clinical decision support capabilities, avoid never events, alert clinical staff to patients in rapid decline, calculate scores to risk stratify your patient population and so much more.  

How Rules can help 

You can help your healthcare organization in so many ways by using rules. That’s why it wasn’t a surprise that we had an overwhelming interest in our Rules education session hosted at this year’s annual MUSE Inspire conference. During this session, we reviewed how rules can help your organization  

• Reduce time at the computer and increase time at the bedside. Rules can provide code that help you to optimize your EMR faster. 
• Automate documentation for patients within normal limits. This allows you to appropriately document queries to drop charges based on time (i.e., every 24 hours) or other documentation criteria. 
• Require, suppress or skip documentation based on the patient’s age or condition. This ensures that nothing gets missed and that documentation is streamlined.  

Get started with MEDITECH Rules 

One of the first steps in using the rules engine in MEDITECH is talking with your frontline MEDITECH users and determining their biggest pain points. We have years of experience working with clients and as a follow-up to our MUSE session, the CereCore rule writing professional services team has put together a downloadable Rules Starter Pack to help your MEDITECH support staff learn and embrace the concepts of rule writing. These basic “how to’s” are the building blocks of rule logic, and mastering some of these skills will put you on the fast track to optimization success.  

Did you know that visual and kinesthetic learners (people who learn by doing) make up 70% of the general population? It is only natural for most of us to learn interactively. By giving clients rules to “play” with and explaining the logic in a way that makes sense to anyone — even without a computer science degree, analysts will be able to easily grasp new concepts and feel empowered to build upon that foundation. 

If you ask any savvy rule writer how they got started they will probably tell you that they learned from copying and changing pre-existing rules, gradually applying more complex logic statements, counting MEDITECH minutes and drinking copious amounts of caffeine. 

So, put a pot of coffee on and get started with our free Rules download today. 

What’s included in the free MEDITECH Rules Starter Pack? 

The CereCore MEDITECH Rule Starter Pack includes the following rules and education materials: 

See rules in action

Watch this demo by colleague Angela DePas and see how rules automatically populate queries and calculations to help make clinical documentation more efficient. 

Sign in to the MEDITECH Resource Library and search for “Rules” to get started with our free Rules download today. 

More resources on MEDITECH

• MEDITECH Rules And Worklists: 125 Options For Ready-Made Functionality 
• MEDITECH Expanse: Customizable Features that Improve Clinician Satisfaction 
• MEDITECH Expanse Registration Worklists: A Quick Win for EHR Optimization and Revenue Cycle
• Download MEDITECH ebooks