St. Bernards Healthcare (Jonesboro, AR) successfully went LIVE with MEDITECH Expanse across their four-hospital network, which includes 440-bed St. Bernards Medical Center, one of the top hospitals in Arkansas ranked by patient volume. The move replaces MEDITECH’s legacy acute, as well as three disparate ambulatory systems and a patient portal.
According to St. Bernards’ VP of Medical Affairs Dr. Kasey Holder, the organization now benefits from a single Expanse EHR that spans all care settings— which also include home health and hospice— giving physicians one patient record and patients a singular patient portal for managing all their information across visits.
“Whether in the hospital, surgical department, or ambulatory setting, our physicians now have an improved overall patient picture,” said Dr. Holder.
“The solution’s design makes it easy for physicians to access the information needed to perform all necessary tasks. They can easily tap through labs and imaging results while documenting and use widgets to personalize their workflows,” added Amirtharaj Dhanaraja, MD, internal medicine specialist. “The shared patient record and integrated messaging also helps physicians share information easily when transitioning patients between care settings.”
The IT staff at St. Bernards said it also sees benefit to managing a single system versus multiple disparate ones.
“Instead of making changes and pulling data from multiple systems to meet regulatory requirements we now can implement changes in one EHR with data readily available for tracking and trending in one solution,” said St. Bernards’ Chief Technology Officer Josh Melton.
To ensure a smooth transition to Expanse, St. Bernards turned to MEDITECH’s Professional Services team to manage the project. “Our project manager assisted us in making our Expanse implementation successful,” said St. Bernards’ CFO Benjamin Barylske. “It was also beneficial to have our project manager and support staff using the same tools throughout the implementation. Use of the same tools reduced confusion and made communication with the various parties easier from the initiation of the project through LIVE and after.”
St. Bernards also adopted several new MEDITECH applications to capitalize on the benefits of having one integrated EHR. These solutions included the Patient and Consumer Health Portal, Surgical Services, Business and Clinical Analytics, Quality and Surveillance, and Critical Care.
“Our critical care team saw their efficiency improve immediately as they transitioned from a laborious paper and scanning system to an integrated EHR that enabled them to share data across care settings,” said St. Bernards’ Nursing Director of Critical Care Units Megan Morgan.
In addition, St. Bernards brought Expanse Ambulatory LIVE at ten of their ambulatory locations and will bring up the remaining locations over the next year.
“We are honored that St. Bernards Healthcare once again chose to partner with MEDITECH and extend our presence across their health system with Expanse,” said MEDITECH Executive Vice President and COO Helen Waters. “We are excited to see their staff and patients thrive with Expanse and look forward to the continuation of a long and successful partnership.”
