MEDITECH Expanse is the most recent version of the MEDITECH electronic health record system. The path to MEDITECH Expanse is a significant transition. So where should you begin? Let’s dive into what’s different about Expanse, why now might be the time for your organization to move to Expanse, and questions to ask prospective vendors and partners as you plan for the transition.
What’s different about Expanse?
Many features and capabilities are new within Expanse when compared to earlier versions of MEDITECH, and these are some of the most significant and transformative:
- Web-enabled EHR saves caregivers time. The redesigned interface is more streamlined which means clinicians spend less time charting and more time with patients.
- Integrated, intuitive workflow-based software provides a comprehensive view of the patient. The gap in data between ambulatory and acute care is closing because of the way Expanse delivers appropriate access to patient data across the care continuum.
- Cloud-based architecture offers a modern experience. Caregivers are on-the-go, taking care of patients, and Expanse provides multiuser and virtualization technologies that help meet the expectations and demands of today’s clinicians.
Why transition to Expanse?
Determining if or when your health system or hospital should consider moving to Expanse is a collaborative and strategic decision-making process involving key clinical and operations stakeholders. To get the conversation started, how would your stakeholders answer these questions? Perhaps their answers lead you to defining the best way to begin planning a move to MEDITECH Expanse.
- What do you wish your health system or hospital could do, but you can’t because of limitations with your current EHR? Expanse offers improved interoperability that supports data exchange with a variety of health institutions across a number of platforms, which could help you achieve patient safety goals.
- Has physician satisfaction been declining because of inefficient workflows that your current EHR can’t solve? With Expanse, physicians (as well as other clinical roles) enjoy streamlined workflows and greater flexibility through desktop and mobile features that will facilitate timely patient care decisions.
- Have you had difficulty finding IT talent to maintain and support older versions of MEDITECH? Would moving to Expanse relieve some of your staffing constraints? Operating on MEDITECH’s latest release would mean you would have access to the integrations, clinical toolkits, and other resources that could make it easier for your IT team to maintain the system and to meet patient safety goals.
- If you are juggling multiple EHRs, have you analyzed the total costs recently? Is your environment becoming too costly to maintain? Could moving to a singular EHR be more cost-efficient? While you may need to perform an IT assessment to obtain a clear picture of your IT infrastructure and inventory, moving to Expanse can reduce costs in the long term. Our experience working with clients has been that Expanse has helped supported their strategic growth.
- What level of ongoing services do you need pre and post implementation? How do you determine if MEDITECH as a Service will meet the customization requirements for your organization? How will you address the care and feeding of the new platform? Expanse opens up new possibilities for supporting patient care, and pragmatic planning is needed that includes IT and post-implementation phases.
Discover more
Download our ebook The Path to MEDITECH Expanse: Why Your Organization Needs a Single EHR, to find more details, analysis, lessons learned from those who have moved to Expanse, budgeting considerations, and ways to maximize MEDITECH regardless of where you are in your journey. Get a glimpse of how MEDITECH Expanse works in a realistic setting by subscribing to CereCore’s MEDITECH Resource Library, our online library of demos in our fully-functional sandbox instance of MEDITECH Expanse.
Questions to ask prospective vendors and partners
If moving to MEDITECH Expanse is the next step for your organization, you’ll want to find the right partner to help you through this significant transition. Finding an implementation partner who is a good fit, understands your needs, and places patient safety first are important qualities. Here’s a starting list of questions that could be helpful for when you interview a potential partner:
- Have you done this kind of MEDITECH migration in the past 5 years?
- What examples do you have to share from other migrations you’ve done?
- How does MEDITECH (specifically Expanse) help our organization get to the next level of operational efficiency?
- How can you help assess our readiness for Expanse based on our current deployment?
- What time frame are we looking at for a migration? For reference, most MEDITECH migrations take 9 months on the expedited end and 15-18 months for large organizations.
- What stakeholders need to be involved to allow for the smoothest migration/implementation
- What are your best practices that will be most important for our team?
- What key areas will need specific focus to help determine the project scope and timeline
- What expectations do we need to set regarding how decisions are made?
