Recently I had the honor of speaking at the MEDITECH Nurse Leader and Home Health Conference. For those of you who are not already familiar, MEDITECH is a leading provider of hospital-based EMRs (Electronic Medical Records). They offer cost-effective solutions to assist healthcare organizations with providing collaborative care across the continuum and meeting the requirements of ARRA and Meaningful Use.
One of MEDITECH’s latest offers is a patient portal that is automated and tablet ready for patients to easily access. This Nerdy Nurse really digs patient portals and EHRs.
As healthcare professionals, we are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of having increase continuity of care. Having an integrated medical record for your entire healthcare system is a giant step towards making this happen.
Speaking to Nurse Leaders in Informatics and Home Care
When I spoke at the MEDITECH nurse conference in Boston, Massachusetts, I was exhilarated to meet so many other “nerdy” nurses. What an empowering experience to be surrounded individuals who are working in hospitals and other healthcare organizations to create better patient care by improving EMR functions and processes for nurses. I remember when I dreamed of getting to work in healthcare IT. Now, not only do I get to do what I love every day, I get to speak publicly about my passions in front of other nurses. Pardon my slang, but that is pretty rad.
Giving Back to Customers
What I was most impressed with about this conference is the amount of time, effort, and money that MEDITECH invested in this conference. The hotel is beautiful. The food is fantastic. And the cocktail hours are a welcome way to network with others in the field of nursing informatics. And if you’re a MEDITECH customer, there is no registration fee what-so-ever.
I have attended conferences that provided far less value in their information sessions, sub-par networking opportunities, and without even a hint of a delicious catered meal. These conferences can cost upwards of $1200 to attend with a full access pass.
My point is that I think MEDITECH does a great job in showing appreciation to their customers through this conference. I was honored to speak about Social Media for Nurses. The honor continues with a feature about The Nerdy Nurse in MEDITECH Magazine.
If I haven’t already made it crystal clear, I love nursing informatics and being a Nerdy Nurse in general.
Thanks MEDITECH for a great event. It was awesome to meet you guys, other MEDITECH users, and share more nerdy nursing and social media goodness with an interested and eager audience.
Have you ever been to a nursing conference? Learn about the AORN Conference and find out if it’s a good fit for you.
Disclosure: I have not received compensation for this post. I attended and spoke at the MEDITECH Nurse Conference 2012.
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Meditech is organising forum on nursing and home health to be held in June. Check it out
https://ehr.meditech.com/events/nurse-and-home-care-forum-0
Hi Brittney
Meditech are organizing their Nurse and Home Care Forum in June this year. They do have a reputation for well thought conferences and one can take home a lot of learning. And not to mention, the chance to network with people in the industry.
Check out the link.
https://ehr.meditech.com/events/nurse-and-home-care-forum-0
I have worked with meditech in various hospitals, very intricate both in pharmacy and nursing. Hats off to you for your input!
Nurse Becca
Good morning,
Nice to hear you had a great time at the conference & props for speaking and getting published, very rad.
I was curious if people at your level hearing some of the concerns about EMRs that I get on the floor. Im most familiar with KP’s flavor of EPIC, over the last few years nurses have consistantly complained that they are “taking care of the computer, not their patients”.
I see their point, with this system the data entry can be a beast. With frequent fliers or complex cases, charting can be upwards of 30 or even 40 minutes per patient. I can also see the companys point of view, from an informatics standpoint, data mining, etc more is always better.
I’ve been telling my friends that EMR is still in its infancy and that as we move foward we will find faster, more efficient ways to chart and most importantly smarter ways to chart. I hope I’m telling them the truth!
People have told me to take advantage of time savers like, macros, functions, hotkeys, templates and I do (most dont) but it still doesnt make up the time away from patients. The difference is I get to go home on time.
Congrats again! looking forward to your thoughts.
Dan
Dan,
Depending on how your system is built and the decisions made by nursing management, it can be less or more cumbersome on the nurses to chart.
For example, patient demographics (as well as smoking status, and other questions that many feel are a waste of time to answer) are required for to be collected in order to meet certain regulations. Because the nurse is the patients primary contact, they are responsible for ensuring this is completed. With items like history, many systems allow you to pull data from previous visits into these fields and the nurse can verify the information rather than keying it manually. Some managers are afraid that some nurses cannot be trusted to verify this information and want the software to force the nurses to enter this information over again. This is one example of how the software could be used to reduce work, but is not being used to it’s fullest potential.
Also, there are so many new regulations that are coming into place to meet ARRA requirements, that often we in IT are struggling to put these requirements in place and have very little time to focus on process improvement and streamlining.
When you were told that EMR is in it’s infancy and it will improve with time, you were told correct. Just like with any technology, it takes a little while to work the kinks out. But look how far we’ve come with cellphones in the past few years. It took nearly 20 years to get to smartphones, and no we have computers in our pockets. I have no doubt that EMR will be the same.
If the computer was not seen as method to police nurses, then there would be a lot less duplication and extra created work for the nurses.
Thanks for your questions!
Thanks for the response, totes appreciate feedback from the “other side of the screen”. I hear what your saying, I fantasize about when i can do my charting ala siri.
Have a good one.