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I am Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. Welcome to today's solutions showcase where we spotlight innovations, making real impact in health systems. Let's take a look at what's working today.

 All right. Today we have a solution showcase and I am excited to be joined by Mike uh, cordiero from uh, MEDITECH and Joe

Diiver From signature Health welcome gentlemen to the show.

Thanks for having.

Nice to see you.

Interoperability has been one of my passions since coming into healthcare. Oh my gosh. Like, uh, man, I'm getting old like 15 years ago 15, 16 years ago. It has always been one of those things that has sort of. Gotten in the way of really being able to get that longitudinal record at the point of care and we're making such great progress.

And that's what this conversation's gonna be about. Joe, I wanna start with you. Signature Healthcare is fiercely independent, one in one of the most competitive markets in the country, Massachusetts. When it comes to interoperability and data exchange, what's the core challenge? That you're trying to solve at Signature Healthcare.

You know, the core challenge for us Bill is again, fiercely independent. You know, we're a small community hospital you know, 84 85 Medicare, Medicaid, right? So surviving and thriving at the end of the day. We do have a lot of patients who may choose to have care elsewhere and to bring that record back in.

We also have a lot of folks who we may not recognize. You know, you're very familiar with the steward healthcare crisis and the fire that we recovered from. And when we had to you know, urgently open up urgent care, we found that 50% of the patients. First visit ever to Signature Healthcare, right?

So the more we know about the patient, the better care we can deliver and for our primary care group, which is continually to grow to be able to get that data from other systems and understand the totality of the patient care is super important. But that data access is a challenge. And certainly the other core challenges we have again, to survive as independent is to help our patients understand the value of sharing their data back with us. And also extending that, sharing back to other systems that they may go to for services that we just don't offer at the end of the day. So.

Yeah, this is so important for providers, but it's also, incredibly important for patients. Mike I want to talk to you. So MEDITECH has launched Traverse Exchange. And You know, you're hearing these challenges from health systems across the country. What's the real problem that Traverse Exchange is designed to address beyond just checking regulatory compliance boxes, I guess.

so Bill, the heart of the issue goes definitely beyond compliance. It's about transforming fragmented data into something usable and trustworthy. Healthcare still runs on siloed information and that fragmentation undermines trust. It slows innovation and ultimately it impacts patient care.

Traverse Exchange is about changing that paradigm. It creates a shared fabric where data isn't just exchanged it's contextualized, it's normalized, and it's made usable across boundaries. So that means clinicians connect on complete information. Health systems can scale without building endless one-off connections finally collaborate on patient care and patient engagement.

The vision here is bigger than compliance. It's about building infrastructure for connected care. So an ecosystem where data flows as freely as care itself.

what was it like for your clinicians when they needed patient data from outside systems?

What was, or wasn't working?

Yeah it was a mess. It was a spider web of data, right? So, you know, the CCDs coming at us from different connections and the faxes coming at us from different places, quite, you know, accessible and actionable by our docs, right? So, very challenging on the resource side, on our end and to pull that data in. Some of the physicians who really wanna dive a little bit further into it, they would, but others would just get frustrated. They wouldn't find value in going into it rather than just talking to the patient, having a conversation with them. It's in a much better state now, which we'll touch on and but very challenging for docs to understand the totality of the data coming at them.

Yeah. And Mike, I've been looking at this this CMS and Teca thing going on over the past couple weeks. I wanna talk a little bit about that. So, Traverse Exchange is a. CMS aligned network with QHN connectivity. In plain terms, what does this unlock for a health system like, like signature they really couldn't do before.

So in plain terms, what this unlocks is the ability for signature to move from fragmented one-off exchanges to being part of a. A truly national trusted network. So with CMS alignment, q hint connectivity, Traverse builds a trust layer that enables data sharing with predefined rules. So that means clinicians can access a more complete patient record no matter where that care is being delivered.

Patients experience fewer gaps and duplicate tests, right? But the health system can collaborate seamlessly with other health systems, partners, payers, other networks, and. There's a bigger impact here when data fragmentation is no longer a barrier, community health systems like Signature can remain independent.

They don't have to feel pressure to merge with large academic centers just to solve interoperability, right? So instead, they can stand on their own confident, they're connected, scalable and capable of delivering that coordinated care. So the real unlock is scale, it's trust, and it's choice.

And CMS, line Q and connectivity mean. Means essentially it's ready to go. I mean, it's ready to connect into that national network, if you will.

Yeah, so those qhs those networks are already predefined. Everyone is playing, you know, a level playing field following the same rules. It's scalable. There's trust there. It's secure. So,

you're an early adopter of Traverse Exchange and the consolidated patient summary. Give us the numbers. What kind of volume are we talking about? And I guess more importantly, tell us a story. What did clinicians see now that they couldn't see before?

I'd love to sort of, personalize this for people who are trying to understand what this means for care.

One key number I always look at as adoption. How many users do I have actually connecting to this thing called Traverse Exchange in my population here. And we're nearing 400 users pretty quickly. Add for a community hospital our size. Pretty significant. And when I look at the documents that we can access those patients that are coming in, where they're coming from, the major hospitals, we see, thousands of records available to us to access. But the thing that makes it different is the MEDITECH viewer which really takes that complex document, puts it into pieces.

So it's really easy, digestible by our providers. To then be able to decide what they want to include in the note and what's applicable to that particular patient. Patient care. Recently through our physician advisory committee one particular provider pulled me aside and said, you know, this is the best technical change I've had in the last number of years. That's gonna help me take care of patients better. So thank you. And the adoption of it's relatively easy as well. So from a change management perspective. Not a heck of a lot of training. We did maybe like a one line, you know, online webinar that's also accessible by our docs anytime. Just quick, easy, painless, and they're accessing the system in a much different way than they did before.

So, making a big impact for us.

Mike the consolidated patient summary is, a pretty amazing how does this differ from the old way of hunting through multiple portals? So it was probably I would imagine created a lot of frustration trying to find this information before.

Yeah, I know for sure. And I think, you know, when we started off, you know, Joe talked about CCD exchange and faxes, right? And the frustration that can that can cause, so, you know, the old way of accessing patient information was largely, you know, CCD based. So care teams would have to.

Sift through long pick list of documents and then have to read through vast amounts of content to find the few salient data points they needed for treatment. And it was inefficient, it was error prone and the real burden when time is critical, right? So the consolidated patient summary changes that dynamic completely.

Instead of chasing documents across portals like you mentioned, or parsing giant CCDs clinicians get a single. Normalized view that surface is the most relevant information they need at the point of care. They can see how medically busy someone is. Their most recent medications problems, so the still salient data points they need for treatment.

So that shift means care team spend less time searching you know, more time caring for patients. Not just a convenience feature, it's actually transformational. It's transforming that fragmented document driven data to a unified patient story. So that's the real impact.

You know, Joe, I wanna talk about adoption. It's been interesting to watch some of these projects that are coming out now. It used to be back in the day you know, with my gray hair, I can say this, that we were pushing technology onto people. It feels different now. It feels like, people are starting to feel the difference.

The adoption's happening organically. People are asking. For the technology to solve real problems for them. Has that been the experience at Signature?

It has been the experience in this particular product and use case for sure. Similar to ambient listening people have seen the value of it and how easy it is and pull it in. and so it's. Been one of those, that's been a game changer at the end of the day for us.

And when you can make an improvement in a provider's workflow with all the other challenges that they face day to day in and day out it's rewarding. You know, it's the purpose of being here at the end of the day.

You know, Mike, more data isn't always necessarily a good thing. More data sometimes can be more noise. talk to me about how, you know, AI within the Expanse Navigator. I is working. I'd love to hear more about that.

So, so Billy Traverse Exchange is completely complimented by AI driven tools like Expanse Navigator and Ask Expanse. Traverse Exchange brings into focus information about the patient that happened outside of the health system the encounters, the labs, the treatments that otherwise would've gone fragmented, but navigator in in Ask Expanse, then help make sense of what.

What what's happening now inside the health system and that they do it in a way that's enriched by this, external context. So you get both perspectives. You get Traverse Exchange provides the wide view of the patient story while navigator and Ask Expanse allows you to deeper into the details that matter right now.

So together they move clinicians from chasing documents to having a complete, trusted view of the patient's longitudinal care record and then the ability to drill down quickly. Into insights they need to act on. So Traverse Exchange shows the whole patient story navigator. Ask Expanse kind of helps you read those chapters of that story and get to the data that matters right now.

It's, described the internet when it first came out. He is like, you know, Google's the ability to drop a cup into the ocean and pull out the drop that you're actually looking for. And that's what we're seeing with these kinds of tools to just ask for that specific information and it goes and it finds it and pulls it out. It's pretty, pretty

Yeah, it's definitely a transformative tech for sure.

Joe, you guys are piloting advanced directive. What's the early read on that?

You know, the early read on is again another piece of data for the important for the patient care and understand what their choices are. Decisions are. And the more information we can gather about the patient. So we're early in talking through that with our physician advisory committee and our quality committee and also carrying over to the acute care side.

But we're eager to to scale that as well. We have a lot of patients that come to us that. English is not their primary language. So if they have these documents in the system, in the network, we can understand and guide them through those challenging clinical times, if you will the better for everybody.

So we're eager to get there.

Awesome. Mike I'm sure this enables a bunch of other things. I'd love for you to help us understand what this means in other areas, maybe payers, genomics, what and whatnot. Where does this go and what else does it enable for us?

So like Bill Genomics is a great example of why it becomes possible when you move beyond just compliance, right? Most networks are focused on exchanging the US core data set defined by regulation. That's important, but that's the floor, right?

So if you imagine a patient's genetic profile being part their longitudinal care record, accessible across care settings and actionable for clinicians making treatment decisions. So instead of the genomics data being siloed in research labs or academic centers. It could flow through the same trust network that already delivers clinical data.

Precision medicine could become part of everyday care in the community health system. Clinicians could tailor therapies anticipate risk and ultimately improve the outcome with confidence that the data secured standard. Traverse Exchange isn't about just checking a regulatory box.

Like, you know, when we opened in this session and talked about it, it's about creating like that fabric where advanced data types like genomics can be turned into use cases. So it's scaling innovation and making personalized care across the entire health ecosystem.

I'd love for you to zoom out and give us an idea of how this level of interoperability supports signature's, goal of staying independent and what does this mean for. competing with big systems or even partnering with big health systems that are around you.

That's a great question, bill. Zooming out, we're actually having conversations with some pretty large groups about referral strategies, if you will. The one challenge everyone thought they had was with it. When we get together, we start talking about Traverse Exchange, and the ability to share data and share information becomes a little bit easier along the way. so it takes those barriers out of the way. And we're, having different conversations in those partnerships and that will help us continue to thrive and survive and be here for our community for another 125 years along the journey.

This is exciting. This is it.

yeah.

As an enabler. This is what we envisioned all those years ago when we stood up the medical record. And it's exciting to see this come to fruition. Joe, Mike, I want to thank you for your time and thank you for your work on this. Really appreciate it. I.

Thanks for having.

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