Delivering Meaningful Care Across a Health System

St. Joseph Becomes MEDITECH's First Corporation to Attest for Meaningful Use.

St. Joseph Health System (Orange, CA), a large network of healthcare providers ranging from 500-bed hospitals to critical access facilities, recently became MEDITECH's first corporation to attest for Meaningful Use Stage 1 under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA).

"For St. Joseph, meeting Meaningful Use closely mirrors our organization's goal of delivering perfect care," says Clyde Wesp, MD, CMIO, at St. Joseph Health System. "By uniting clinicians and informatics, we've set a clear and reachable goal of optimizing our MEDITECH solution to meet both our own hospital objectives and government standards."

Attesting for Meaningful Use as a large corporation poses unique challenges. "All our facilities started the Meaningful Use journey at different places," remarks Wesp. "Standardizing the way our individual facilities operated was key in getting the corporate organization on the same page."

St. Joseph developed a Meaningful Use Steering Committee which evaluated each facilities' current state as well as provided a summary of problems and challenges that needed to be addressed. "We used a point system to track each facilities' progress with the Meaningful Use metrics," says Wesp. "Hospital-specific and system-level scorecards were used for a composite view of all the Meaningful Use metrics. Having transparency of this magnitude was key in establishing a clear path of our organization's direction as well as being able to quickly identify issues before they created a roadblock in the project."

Part of the government funds received will be recycled back into more advanced technology solutions to meet Stage 2. "We plan to upgrade and invest in additional tools to meet the next level of Meaningful Use requirements," concludes Wesp.