Our Latest Stage 6 Customer: Pawnee Valley Community Hospital

By teaming up with Hays Medical Center, this facility becomes one of the few Critical Access Hospitals to achieve a high level of EMR adoption.


As a Critical Access Hospital (CAHs), 25-bed Pawnee Valley Community Hospital (Larned, KS) faced severe budgetary restraints which threatened the future of its facility. However, by working with Hays Medical Center (Hays, KS), the organization was able to access a fully integrated MEDITECH HCIS that they never would have been able to afford on their own. With this collaboration, Pawnee was not only able to quickly improve its operations and quality of care, but also recently became one of the few CAHs in the country to achieve Stage 6 EMR Adoption recognition.

"Achieving Stage 6 shows our commitment to using I.T. to impact the quality and safety of the care we offer patients," says Matt Heyn, CEO at Pawnee Valley. "Our mission is to be the best CAH in rural America, and I believe Stage 6 is a significant step forward in fulfilling this goal."

Pawnee Valley began using the MEDITECH system on March 1, 2010, and in just a year's time, the CAH received notification that they had achieved Stage 6.

"Being taken under the wing of Hays Medical, we immediately saw the benefits of using an integrated system like MEDITECH to improve patient outcomes," says Heyn. "We were able to utilize the same processes and procedures that have proven to be successful at our host site. Also, with Hays Medical already being a Stage 6 recipient, we were able to take their lead and rapidly transform from a completely paper-driven environment, to one that is more technologically advanced."

Leaders at Hays Medical are proud of how far Pawnee Valley has come since adopting MEDITECH. "We congratulate Pawnee Valley on their accomplishment in using data to enhance patient care," says Bill Overbey, CIO at Hays Medical. "We are thrilled to have the opportunity to help caregivers at Pawnee Valley meet their patient safety goals."

In light of their success, the small but ambitious health care provider has already set its sights on Stage 7. "Our physicians are very progressive in their use of technology, and we are actively working with Hays Medical to one day become completely paperless," says Heyn.