Guest Spot: Memorial Hospital and Manor Overcomes MEDITECH Challenges with a Little Help from Some Friends

By: Stan Otts, MIS Director, Memorial Hospital and Manor

We are an 80-bed hospital in the very rural corner of southwest Georgia. In the last half of the 1990’s the Hospital Board hired a new chief administrator who immediately recognized that our decade-old mainframes in Lab, Pharmacy, Medical Records and Billing were not going to survive the Year2K rollover. As those four departments were the only ones in "the digital age", he was also hamstrung by the absence of anything that could tell him where the money was going. He needed a whole-institution system, and (largely by lack of competition) MEDITECH became this facility’s "Hobson’s Choice" for an HCIS solution. We were number 80-something in all of America to sign up with MEDITECH for Client/Server.

As anyone who has dealt with Client/Server can plainly tell you (at least in those days a decade ago) what you get out of the box is largely a vacant system and you do everything for yourself. MEDITECH's solution for finding the things you need to know which were not already hard-coded into a menu (everything from the [then called] HCPCS annual reports; to the Purchasing Department looking up a vendor’s open P.O.’s by name) should be done by the end-user writing his/her own NPR reports.

Personnel with skill-sets that lend themselves to learning NPR in this neck-o-the-wood are few and far between. At that point in time, this entire corner of the state only had 33K dial-up access to the internet (while Atlanta had BroadBand) as only the larger nearby towns had 56K access. Hopefully that factoid illustrates that people with any programming sensibilities could move off 100 miles to real urban cities and double their pay. Whether you are optimistic enough to call this a real challenge, or ornery enough to wonder if MEDITECH’s parents were married at the time of its birth, it was a huge issue for years.

We sent 12 to 15 folks to Boston to take the "NPR Beginner’s Course" and they came back bamboozled by the fact that there were few resources for each module, and even fewer people at MEDITECH willing to lead a neophyte by the nose. Consequently, they soon became discouraged and quit. By this time, it is 2000 or 2001 and we had been Client/Server’d for three or four years through the course of which we tried several companies whose claims to fame were they were staffed by people who were MEDITECH exiles and escapees. The thing we (politically) needed the worst was what our Clinical Coordinator referred to as "the graphics report". This is a collection of Vital Signs plus Inputs and Outputs for patients over a multi-day time span with a graph across the first page charting the patient’s temperature for which our ballpoint-pen era physicians drooled over, griped, complained and cried about its absence for 3 years. Said company "worked" on a solution for 14 months but produced no useable results.

Enter a little help from some friends--CRH Consulting. In less than 2 days “Dennis” produced a completely working example that we still use to this day (albeit with frequent revisions when Ring Updates and errant DTS’s come down the pike).

Working with CRH is an absolute pleasure, so much so that we find ourselves using them more and more. Need an extract from B/AR that the UNIX system at the Credit Bureau can import? "Oh, Dennis!" Need to find some missing data for any one of the numerous mandatory reports demanded by the State or the Fed? "Oh, Dennis!" Very soon, report needs made the MIS Department sound like an episode of Jack Benny. "Oh, Dennis!...Oh, Dennis!"

Last autumn we threw a big one to CRH. We purchased a PACS system for radiology and needed an interface between MEDITECH and the PACS. We could have gotten a canned interface from MEDITECH (for a LOT of money) or from several vendors set up in the interface business (for slightly less money). But those would have been like the original Henry Ford about his cars: "You can have it in any color you want so long as it is black." CRH was far more tractable, and had the best price of everyone.

This turned out to be a huge ordeal for both of us, but I can hardly blame CRH. It seems this respected PACS company (on the VERY DAY we signed the contract) merged with a large multi-national corporation. As time wore by, it seems (at least from my perspective) that this new internal paradigm was ruffling the feathers of a few old-guard PACS employees. CRH had to weather through missing information, misinformation, and the absence of communication from the PACS company, but stuck with the 2-month implementation for nearly a year...and never raised their price. I know they lost their behinds in the cost over-run, but a lesser company with more common ethics (or the absence of any) would have cut-and-run leaving us in the lurch.

Not CRH. They are dedicated, loyal, detail oriented and have great follow-through. And if you know and respect VALCO, you should hear the accolades they ladle on CRH.

This is a fine collection of people, who always call back, answer email, answer voice-mail and have an excellent price-point for very high quality work.

We’ve also just had CRH here for a week-long training course to familiarize us, the few die-hards left who seem to grasp NPR, with a Beginner/Intermediate course which we all agreed taught us more about NPR than the three trips to Boston, or an in-house week-long training session a few years back with that other company.

So, here’s to getting a little help from your friends. Well done, CRH. Well done, indeed!

Stan Otts is MIS Director of Memorial Hospital and Manor, an 80-bed community hospital, 107-bed long-term care facility, and 22-bed assisted living facility. Memorial Hospital and Manor has served the healthcare needs of Decatur County and surrounding communities for almost 50 years. For more information, visit them online at www.mh-m.org.