Magnolia Regional Health Center, where David Parker is CIO/VP of Information Technology, is taking physician engagement to the next level. An annual physician retreat helps the health center gather information on what the providers need to perform the best care possible. In this interview, Parker shares how their providers drove the decision for a new EHR; how the MEDITECH platform has changed over the years; and the benefits of total provider engagement in a transition process. He also discusses the issues that arise with legacy systems and how archival is top of mind for the organization.

CHIME Fall CIO Forum provides valuable education programming, tailored specifically to meet the needs of CIOs and other healthcare IT executives. Justin Campbell, of Galen Healthcare Solutions, had the opportunity to attend this year’s forum and interview CIOs from all over the country. Here is the next interview in the series:

Key Insights

In our community, we enjoy our autonomy and do not want to get into the hip pocket of another big healthcare organization.

We followed the Ready program that MEDITECH offered to us and that significantly helped us achieve a successful implementation.

When we were running the MEDITECH Magic system, we had Magic on the acute side and GE Centricity on the ambulatory side. We had lab and radiology report interfaces, but aside from that, there was very little other integration between those systems.

Although physicians typically don’t want change and appreciating the monumental project that comes with replacing systems, they recognized this is the way for us to progress forward. 

That was the intent of the retreat – the findings from those breakout sessions. We took that and and determined how to start addressing this for the physicians. That’s what drove our selection process.

We know we can save our hospital money if we can pick an archival solution and sunset these legacy systems.

Campbell: Please tell me a little about Magnolia Regional Health Center?

Parker: Magnolia Regional Health Center is in the northeastern corner of Mississippi, about an hour and a half east of Memphis. We serve seven counties, with a population base of about 200,000 people. We’re licensed for 200 beds but operate 171 beds. We have roughly 200 physicians within our organization.

We have a graduate medical education program here, so we’re able to raise our own physicians, which has been very valuable for the past decade that the program has been in place. We’ve had one or more members from every graduating class either choose to continue their residency here or complete their residency program and then choose to set up shop with us; it’s been quite a blessing for our community. We are a city and county owned hospital, meaning we’re not associated with any other health organizations; we’re a standalone system. Our closest competitor is roughly an hour away. We’re fortunate we don’t have heavy competition in our neighborhood, although that’s starting to change. We’re starting to see a little more encroachment in our community from other healthcare systems. We’re all being pressured from different angles and trying to find ways to grow our systems; we must adjust and adapt.

Campbell: Great, thank you. What EMR system does MRHC currently leverage? With usability and productivity deficiencies currently driving replacement activity in the EMR market, do you have any plans to migrate platforms?

Parker: We’ve been a customer of MEDITECH since the early 90’s. Last year, we implemented MEDITECH’s 6.1 – their latest platform – on the acute side and this year, we’re implementing MEDITECH’s web ambulatory product; we’re a MEDITECH customer across the board. We have almost every single module that MEDITECH offers as it’s a good fit for a hospital of our size.

During the vendor selection process, several of our physicians wanted us to look at Epic as they had trained at much larger hospitals and knew the Epic platform and liked it. However, it was just not in the cards for us, as it was too expensive. Epic doesn’t sell to directly to community based hospitals like us, so the only option we had was to partner with another Epic hospital. We took that message back to our physician base. Here in our community we enjoy our autonomy and do not want to get into the hip pocket of another big healthcare organization, so we decided that was not an option.

The MEDITECH Magic platform has been a good product for us. We used it until it was getting long in the tooth. The younger doctors did not like the look and feel of Magic platform, so, we started visiting with MEDITECH and learning how they were moving forward. Their R&D dollars were not going towards Magic, but rather, they were going towards their new 6.x platform. As such, we selected that as our go-forward platform. We implemented that with MEDITECH’s Ready  methodology that they’ve put in place. It’s a project timeline and guide to follow with best practices for choosing your consultants; making sure those consultants know the system – they’re trained and certified; determining what teams to put together internally; how to backfill for them; and how to allow those teams to fully focus on the implementation. We followed the Ready program that MEDITECH offered to us and that significantly helped us achieve a successful implementation.

Campbell: It sounds like you made an outstanding decision to stick with the platform that you’ve long been on and served itself well to you. MEDITECH is well known for their stability and it’s great to hear that you’re advancing your use of their platform and adopting even more features through it. To that regard, tell me a little bit about how that decision was made in the context of interoperability demands? A lot of groups consolidate and move to a single solution so they don’t have to worry about interoperability within the enterprise, especially between care settings. Could you touch on your experience with that and how that’s handled within MRHC?

Parker: When we were running the MEDITECH Magic system, we had Magic on the acute side and then GE Centricity on the ambulatory side. We had lab and radiology report interfaces, but aside from that, there was very little other integration between those systems. As we moved forward, the doctors expressed the desire for one platform. When MEDITECH came on-site to do their demos, they also showed how this new product they were working on that would be fully integrated. The doctors who saw it could see the benefit of it. Although physicians typically don’t want change and appreciating the monumental project that comes with replacing systems, they recognized this is the way for us to progress forward.  Meaningful Use is here to stay and we decided we must continue plugging away at that and other anticipated regulatory measures. Our physicians recognized they’re going to require more and more use of electronic health records and having those systems integrated so we can harvest the data for reporting and analytics is critical to our success.

I’m very proud to say that our physicians drove us to make this move. We have an annual physician educational retreat, where we meet off-site and break into sessions. Out of all those different breakout sessions, there was the resounding sentiment from the 80 or so physicians who attended to replace MEDITECH Magic. It wasn’t that they pushed for a particular system, but they said, ‘We have used Magic for many years, we have made Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2 with MEDITECH Magic, but we’re very frustrated with it. It’s time to go look for something else.’ That was the intent of the retreat, the findings from those breakout sessions. We took that and determined how to start addressing this for the physicians. That’s what drove our selection process for the next six months or so of 2014. We looked at the options including Epic, Cerner, McKesson, and MEDITECH. We made the doctors a part of that process and solicited their feedback. We also solicited input from all the other departments that it would affect.

Campbell: It’s truly profound that the providers drove the selection process, where you have engagement and they feel like they’re a part of it. Shifting gears a bit, can you tell me about data you migrated from GE Centricity? Did you abstract the data into the new system? Was there a data migration that took place? Is the GE Centricity system still running?

Parker: That is the one thing that’s been a little frustrating in this whole process, as MEDITECH does not have a migration path from Magic or any external system, so it was not an option to migrate data into the system. We still have GE Centricity running, as well as the Magic system, so we can still access historical data in those systems. MEDITECH 6.1 contains a link that allows you to contextually SSO to Magic, which is helpful, but we still need the icon for Centricity on the desktops for the users. Our plan over the next year is to start looking at how we are going to archive all of the data and retire the legacy systems. We have MEDITECH Magic data, we have MEDITECH Homecare Hospice product from years in the past, we have GE Centricity records, and we’ve got some other little systems that we need to archive. We need to be able to retire those legacy systems because right now we still maintain those servers and pay some licensing to keep the systems running.

Campbell: How does archival fit within the overall project of system upgrade and replacement?

Parker: We’ve been very focused on the 6.x implementation for the last two years. We kicked off at the beginning of 2015 with an implementation of the acute side, and that was roughly a 16-18-month project. Once we were live, we spent several months fixing things then shifted our focus to ambulatory. Now that ambulatory is live, we’ll probably spend a few months on enhancements and additional optimization opportunities. Then we’ll start looking at how to get rid of the technical debt that’s looming out there. We know we can save our hospital money if we can pick an archival solution and sunset these legacy systems.

Campbell: That sounds very logical. Shifting gears a bit, what is MRMC’s plans for population health management? Are you leveraging a solution today or do you have plans to? Or is it even something that’s applicable to your organization today?

Parker: It’s not too applicable right now. We do have the surveillance dashboards MEDITECH offers and we’re building them now, but don’t have them live yet. We’re evaluating incorporating those dashboards into the workflow, and we have an internal committee pursuing that initiative. Sepsis prevention is the big area that we’re focusing on right now. Once we get our arms around that, we’ll move onto other population health initiatives. We’re in discussions with a big hospital that’s about an hour south of us regarding collaboration through health information exchange. As we move that forward we’ll look at getting more population health data out of MEDITECH and into this bigger group of hospitals that’s forming a larger community.

Campbell: It’s how you survive in this value-based world. The data sharing must happen and that’s why data blocking is such a huge topic. The patients are demanding that the data follow them, but the infrastructure may not be in place to allow it to happen. Do you have a comment on any other projects that might be ongoing at the organization once you’ve completed the implementation?

Parker: One of the next big large initiatives we plan on tackling is clinical documentation improvement. We recently purchased Nuance’s Clintegrity product and we’ll soon be focusing on getting that up and going. We think that’s a game changer for us and our physicians have been clamoring for something like this. We survived the switch over from ICD-10, but there’s so much more that we could be doing to improve documentation, to code our charts better and to accurately reflect the health of our patients. We were very disappointed in our health grade score, which surprised us, but as we started digging into the data it was clear to us that we are not doing a good job of documenting just how sick our patients are. It looks like they’re not very sick, and they come in and get much sicker, or pass away, and we haven’t done a good job to document that these patients were very sick when they presented at the hospital to begin with. The CDI program that we’re putting into place with Nuance will take us roughly six months to get it in place, but we think it will be a positive change for us.

About David Parker
David Parker serves as CIO/VP of IT for Magnolia Regional Medical Center, a non-profit, city owned, HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6, 200-bed acute care hospital located in Corinth, MS. Mr. Parker leads an IT team of 24 employees and is responsible for IT management, project leadership, budgeting, & strategic planning. Mr. Parker currently oversees upgrading of platforms and operating systems as a part of MRHC’s initiative to become a HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 hospital.

Prior to his current position, Mr. Parker served as an IT director for a smaller health care system in Oklahoma for 10 years. Mr. Parker has also held positions where responsibilities included support of a local hospital finance system and electronic medical records implementation at a health care facility.

Mr. Parker holds a BS in Finance from Texas A&M University. 

About Justin Campbell
Justin is Vice President, Strategy, at Galen Healthcare Solutions. He is responsible for market intelligence, segmentation, business and market development and competitive strategy. Justin has been consulting in Health IT for over 10 years, guiding clients in the implementation, integration, and optimization of clinical systems. He has been on the front lines of system replacement and data migration is passionate about advancing interoperability in healthcare and harnessing analytical insights to realize improvements in patient care. Justin can be found on Twitter at @TJustinCampbell and LinkedIn.