Community Hospital Upgrades to MEDITECH Expanse EHR for Interoperability

Warren General Hospital, a rural community hospital in Pennsylvania, has decided to implement the MEDITECH Expanse EHR to enhance interoperability and improve the patient experience.

The community hospital currently uses a legacy MEDITECH solution in its hospital, three different EHR platforms across its ambulatory practices, and more than 300 software programs overall. Depending on where patients receive care, they may have to enroll in three patient portals to view all their medical information. With Expanse, Warren General patients will be able to access their EHR data in one place.

“We were impressed with the capabilities and upgrades Expanse offered,” Rick Allen, CEO of Warren General Hospital, said in a press release. “As an independent community hospital, we are challenged every which way, and we now have the ability to improve our EHR at a predictable and sustainable cost model.”

As the primary care destination for all residents in the county and surrounding area, Warren General Hospital has well-established referral partnerships with other health systems. The Expanse platform’s Traverse Interoperability solution will help support EHR data exchange with partners for care coordination.

The USDA’s Emergency Rural Healthcare Grants program partially funded the EHR implementation.

“We budget to maintain system support for every IT platform that we manage, and it’s clear this migration will result in long-term savings for us,” said CIO Cheryl Girardier. “Our EHR capabilities will significantly exceed what we have in place today, on a consolidated platform and lower total cost down the road.”

Kathryn Carlson, Warren General’s executive director of quality and operations, noted that the move to Expanse will also support quality initiatives and an enhanced patient experience.

“I think Expanse is really going to help us, by presenting information in a unified format that patients can understand, and physicians can gain insights from,” Carlson said. “Having so many fractured systems makes it harder for inpatient doctors to know what is happening on the outpatient side.”

“Under one platform, patients’ prescriptions, treatments, and recommendations of care will all be visible,” she added. “That is going to be huge for us.”