Optimizing MEDITECH with Flexible Health IT Infrastructure

MEDITECH has a long history of high EHR vendor satisfaction among hospitals of all sizes, especially those facing limited budgets and resources. A key factor contributing to the EHR company’s success among these organizations remains its commitment to working collaboratively with its customers on not only implement but also optimize their EHR based on their resources, according to KLAS.

With healthcare organizations looking to improve the performance and reduce the cost of supporting their EHR and health IT infrastructure, those with tighter resources have a lower margin for error. But the cost of falling behind the industry by failing to modernize their infrastructure could prove detrimental to their ability to deliver effective patient care and sustain their operations in a highly competitive market.

The cost of inefficiency

Future innovation depends on smart investments in modern IT infrastructure that delivers increased performance, reliability, and availability and enables further digital transformation that meets the evolving needs of hospitals.

“MEDITECH has a wide customer base on a variety of platforms including on-premise infrastructure and cloud-based hosted models,” says James Walsh, Global Account Manager for MEDITECH at Dell Technologies. “Many other hospitals still rely on a mixed environment with four or five different manufacturers and a bunch of different service contracts.”

Maintaining operationally complex, slow, and expensive health IT infrastructure limits the ability of these organizations to use their limited resources elsewhere, such as ensuring mission-critical systems and applications are meeting the needs of providers and patients.

Fortunately, MEDITECH customers can collaborate with technology partners validated by the company that have a long history of meeting the diverse compute and storage needs of hospitals.

“The key to infrastructure agility is the combination of partners, technologies, and services,” Walsh explains. “These organizations can improve their on-premise infrastructure by simplifying their IT environments. If they are on-premise today, but are thinking about moving to a hosted model in the future, they can upgrade that setup in such a way that enables that switch and avoids unnecessary growing pains. Whatever the upgrade, it will allow them to be more compatible with a cloud or the edge model down the road.”

Return on investment

By working with strategic partners, MEDITECH customers can get the most out of their system's performance and security rather than rely on legacy infrastructure that requires both time and personnel to function.

“It’s going to perform better, be more efficient, and be more secure just by nature of going to the latest and greatest on the infrastructure side,” Walsh adds.

Security is especially important as the healthcare sector has become a target for bad actors and ransomware attacks. More than half of the ransomware incidents during the first half of 2021 involved healthcare organizations in the United States, according to the Department of Health & Human Services Cybersecurity Program. Now more than ever, healthcare organizations need to have health IT infrastructure that is resilient and able to recover quickly in the event of an attack.

And modernized infrastructure can lead to benefits beyond MEDITECH EHR technology across the entire healthcare organization.

“A strategic partner can help manage hardware and software more efficiently. A proven technology partner is able to strengthen their MEDITECH environment, imaging, exchange, file servers — everything you need. Whether a hospital wants to stay on-premise, opt for a hybrid model, or move toward a hosted environment, it needs to be able to collaborate with a partner capable of supporting each of these options as a more affordable capital or operational expenditure,” Walsh stresses.

A foundation for the future

The recent global medical emergency proved to be a major disrupter for the healthcare industry, shifting how organizations operate — spurring digital transformation at an unprecedented pace. From a technology perspective, it highlighted the importance of having IT infrastructure to keep pace with rapid change. For many of these organizations, the pandemic came to represent an opportunity to reimagine health IT infrastructure based on new demands from providers and patients.

For many organizations, these developments have led to increased interest in a variety of approaches to health IT infrastructure. Limited resources and appetite for risk mean some will take a different journey than others, but that should not prevent them from thinking long term and developing a thorough plan for the future.

“Organizations need a solution for now and also a solution that will enable them for the future,” says Juan Ortiz, Sr., Marketing Manager Healthcare & Life Sciences at Dell Technologies.

“The idea is to be forward-looking in the event that they might need to change their infrastructure environments quickly — from on-premise to hybrid to the cloud, and everything in-between,” he continues. “What they need more than anything is flexibility. Their investment can lead to improved performance today, while also positioning them for whatever comes next.”

MEDITECH customers are well-positioned with an EHR that can meet with their evolving needs. With the support of strategic partners, they can further enhance their capabilities while maintaining a balance between performance and cost.

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Dell Technologies provides transformative solutions that help healthcare-life sciences organizations prepare for the road ahead - from the point of care to the core to the cloud. From the world’s leading healthcare systems to rural health clinics, we offer essential infrastructure solutions to help you achieve business and clinical agility. Visit us at www.DellTechnologies.com/Healthcare