Comments on: News 5/20/09

By: MT Consultant

MT Consultant — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:49:18 +0000

I am a consultant who works with hospitals that use the MEDITECH HCIS and have foudn that they do have a lower cost of ownership. My company engaged HIMSS Analytics to do such a study to confirm and they showed that MEDITECH hospitals spend about 50% less on IT than other hospitals that use other major HCIS vendors. (Spending on IT by hospitals that use Epic far exceeds every HCIS vendor.) Also, MEDITECH has as many hospitals that have achieved Stage 6 as any other vendor so I’d prefer not to hear how it isn’t as good a product.

By: Lazlo Hollyfeld

Lazlo Hollyfeld — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:31:19 +0000

As a former policy wonk/researcher, it would basically be a fool errand’s to try to empirically determine if Meditech hospitals had “cheaper cost/better value” than say hospitals with Paragon. Few things that come including a ton of independent variables to to control, a difficult choice on what to choose as a dependent variable(s), and the lovely mitigating factors that you might not be able to measure well/at that they may play havok on the relationship between the independent variables & dependent variables.

You could certainly go through this exercise (and health service researchers certainly face these issues all the time) but you have a bunch of limitations in the discussion section. My bet is that you would get a fuzzy answer that really didn’t give you much in takeaway about a hospital using Meditech vs. hospital using Meditech.

By: Smalltown CIO

Smalltown CIO — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:11:30 +0000

I agree with “Unfrozen Caveman CIO” – I want the truth. The problem is that for the past 40 years, most consultants and competitors of Meditech have been selling the same old untrue arguments against them hoping they can prevent at least a portion of the hospital market from finding out why those hospitals that use Meditech never leave it. You can bash Meditech all you want – it certainly isn’t perfect. But I have never heard a legitimate argument to contrary regarding the on-going cost effectiveness of Meditech. I see some of the prices that organizations are paying for competing products and it isn’t hard to understand why healthcare costs are out of hand. I would like to see some sort of comparison between Meditech-based facilities and facilities using competing products to determine which are providing more cost effective care. Those facilities using Meditech have found they don’t need to pay Cadillac prices for an HIT product that meets the their needs and those of their patients.

One more truth – to my knowledge Meditech has never sun-setted a previous software platform. Can McKesson and others claim that level of loyalty to their technology and customers?

By: jesran

jesran — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:17:20 +0000

“Like most government expense enabled by lobbying, I’m skeptical of the stated outcomes (other than putting a lot of government money in private hands quickly, which was the real hot button).”

About this… my concern is that the private hands that receive the public money must be US Citizens or at least workers physically located in the US so that the stimulus money doesn’t blow away to Bangalore. Does Obama intend to stimulate overseas consultants? Let’s face it, EMR programming can be done from anyplace with a network connection and overseas consultants work on the cheap many times.

EMR programming knows no borders, but in this case maybe it should.

By: Deborah Kohn

Deborah Kohn — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:07:45 +0000

From Candy Albicans re: certifications and Mr.HISTalk’s response re: looking first at academic, then at any apps work.

I also look at those professional certifications requiring the passing of an organized, structured, monitored, and rigorous examination that requires a fee but validates years of academic and/or demonstrated application training (e.g., ACHE Fellows, Registered Nurses, Registered Pharmacists, Registered Health Information Managers, etc.). Some certifications require a fee but only require applicants to sit in a course room / access online tutorials for a few days, and, upon completion of the course work and a summary examination, voila, one is certified.