MEDITECH

university.

Because then, you can tell it would be on EPIC, but the rest of the territory will still be on Meditech.

That standard is needed to be able for all the systems to talk to each other, rather than trying to force us to go into a project that we can't do to change our operating system.

I

It's been a busy six months, [chuckles] you know, since our transition.

Working in our new EMR, we switched from Meditech over to Epic.

We integrated all of our ancillary services as we joined the clinic in Devils Lake, which was already part of Altru.

And honestly, Laura, just rebuilding our culture, and we've done all of that under the objectives to position Altru Devils Lake as a healthcare hub in north central North Dakota, support a patient first hub-and-spoke care model, and improve the patient experience through customer service and facility improvement.

that's excellent.

Well, you know, Sarah, we've had the privilege of supporting Bethany Children's and optimizing your current Meditech environment.

And from your seat, what challenges was Bethany Children's looking to address when that work began? And what's the biggest impact that you've seen from that?

Well, we are, and I generally bristle at the word unique, but we are.

So an example, a big example.

So Epic, an EHR company, Meditech, Oracle, they all have AI that behind the scenes does stuff.

And I say stuff specifically.

Everything from they've got their own AI scribing tools, right, that listen for the conversations and translate those into notes.

They've got tools that can look and summarize, you know, the notes and give you a little summary.

You know, all those kinds of things are now baked into the EHR, whereas before there was a worry where do I have to buy Anthropic myself in order to do this kind of stuff? Right.

Well, Meditech has an AI built with a partner that they leverage and white label into their own.

Oracle use their own because Oracle, Oracle AI, Meditech uses their own.

A few years later, right behind the ears, I asked the CEO of this multi-billion dollar company if he thought it would be a good idea to start a healthcare division.

After he looked up and said, I don't know who you are, but go ahead and get it started, I became the director of a healthcare division for that hardware company, and we basically sold particular products to Meditech and Epic and, at that time, HBOC and so forth.

So that was the earliest stage, though, of just to give people a sense of how old we are, Hamid, that there was a period before which electronic medical records really didn't exist.

And those are the early, still very large, Epic being the dominant players in the field of Electronic medical records, which which I think doctors and patients think should be about health care, care and quality, but were actually the basics of health care billing.

So you bought a lab system from Cerner, you bought a pharmacy system from someone else, and that was the best thing to do.

And then in the early 2000s, things turned around, and you wanted one monolithic system so you can recognize the patient no matter where the care was delivered and so forth.

So in 93, I started my first company, and that was to help implement Meditech and Epic products.

facilities because PCs were brand new and everyone was coming from the terminal side.

Yeah, it was early on in my career as a technologist, my entire early life started and sold to pure technology companies.

I then pivoted into health care when my father and grandmother passed away one summer and I was forced to get into their med records, try to get them into hospice, digging into like legacy Meditech green screens.

And I was just shocked, frankly, at the state of where we're spending 25% of GDP almost.

And Charlie Baker was running for governor in Massachusetts.

Mm-hmm.

Which is all of us have fairly mature EMRs that at this point in time continue to make modifications and improvements to the tools that they have, right? I mean, it's just whether you have Meditech, whether you're Epic, whether you're Cerner, whether you're Oracle, like however you are, those tools continue to mature and continue to put out new offerings, um, that layer in more, um, technology that has re-more recently become available, right? So you're seeing whether it's search, whether it's find, whether it's symptom checker, whether it's other types of things, chat functionality, texting functionality, you're seeing more of that come out in the base tools-

Mm-hmm

... i.e., that maturation.

Oracle Health was there.

Meditech was there.

And Delos was there.

And they have an EMR, which is only available in Europe.

Oracle Health was there.

Meditech was there.

And Delos was there.

And they have an EMR, which is only available in Europe.