With hours of manual outbound calls on their plates and phones ringing off the hook, many organizations using MEDITECH are looking for ways to stretch their limited staff farther to create the best-in-region experience that will continue to differentiate their brand. 

Imagine if your own organization had hours more time for each staff member to provide a truly concierge-level experience to your patients – ensuring they were up to date on preventive care appointments, checking in after procedures, providing resources to patients who needed financial, language, or other support, and much more. 

These Luma customers have integrated automated and self-service actions using Luma directly into their MEDITECH systems to take manual work off of their staff’s plates and enable a better experience for both patients and staff.

Northfield Hospital + Clinics

At Northfield Hospital + Clinics, “we’re like David between two Goliaths,” said Vern Lougheed, Director of IT. Northfield is located in rural Minnesota, and competes for patients who also have the option to visit large health systems in the Twin Cities like Mayo Clinic. 

Northfield chose Luma to power its patient experience initiatives by integrating directly with MEDITECH via APIs. The resulting efficiency helps Northfield stand out: “Our goal is to provide easy access to our organization anywhere a patient wants it,” said Debbie Oathoudt, IT Program Manager.
Before Luma, Northfield staff manually called each patient for appointment reminders, totaling 150-200 daily calls per FTE. Now, with reminders that are automatically sent to patients with appointments scheduled in MEDITECH, Northfield saves 80 hours in reminder calls every month. The reminders have also helped decrease no-shows by 15%.

Phelps Memorial Health Center

For Phelps Memorial Health Center, where many patients travel long distances to get to care, better staff efficiency and more patient convenience have a direct impact on patient outcomes. 

API integration with MEDITECH helps Phelps Memorial patients prepare for visits ahead of time by:

• Self-scheduling their own visits directly into MEDITECH Expanse.
• Responding to reminders that are automatically sent based on their upcoming appointments in the MEDITECH schedule.
• Completing intake forms online that are sent back to MEDITECH Expanse before the visit.

Self-service and digital options have been “so well received at Phelps Memorial” by both patients and staff, says Director of EHR Kurt Schmidt. 84% of patients who receive intake forms from Luma complete them ahead of their appointment, and “different departments come to me and ask how they can implement Luma into their workflows,” Kurt said. Phelps Memorial reaches more than 98% of their patient population using Luma. 

Get Outcomes Like These

Northfield Hospital + Clinics and Phelps Memorial Health Center show the power of giving scheduled patients actionable next steps. Not only does this help patients remember and prepare for their appointments, but allowing patients to self-service takes hours of work off of your staff. What’s more, data from KLAS Research shows that patients want self-service options and will even select a provider based on available digital offerings. 

If you’re interested in the possibilities of integrating options like these with MEDITECH, reach out today:

• Patient self-scheduling
• Actionable reminders that allow patients to cancel and reschedule their appointments and join an automated waitlist 
• Automatic offers to switch to text message for patients waiting on hold 
• Automated requests for patients to confirm appointments, complete forms, and more

We’re thrilled to announce that Luma is now fully integrated into one of the healthcare industry’s top electronic health record providers to deliver powerful new capabilities to the thousands of healthcare providers that use the MEDITECH Expanse EHR. This integration will provide new and powerful features for the thousands of healthcare providers that use the Expanse platform.

As an initial member of the MEDITECH Alliance program, and currently the only patient-facing solution included in the program, Luma collaborated with MEDITECH to validate integration of its Patient Success Platform™ and MEDITECH-enabled workflows for integration with MEDITECH Expanse, including patient scheduling, conversational messages, operational and clinical forms, staff scheduling, and more.

Today’s announcement exemplifies how both healthcare providers and patients benefit when a major health system’s EHR provider opens API technologies. This is especially true when the health system goes the extra mile by providing a mechanism for third-party developers, such as Luma, to validate and perfect their own innovative solutions within a real MEDITECH EHR installation.

Five years in the making

Back in 2018, MEDITECH launched MEDITECH Greenfield, an application development environment to fuel the building and adoption of third-party applications. We paid particular attention to this announcement because it emphasized interoperability and offered support for useful technical connections like RESTful APIs, including FHIR. Better still, the program is backed by the MEDITECH technical teams to help developers (and, by extension, MEDITECH customers) maximize the value of the Expanse EHR.

When MEDITECH invited Luma to join the initial roster of third-party developers for the MEDITECH Alliance program, we jumped at the opportunity. MEDITECH Alliance provides greater transparency for organizations interacting with MEDITECH, and simplifies the discovery and purchasing process for customers who want to broaden the capabilities of their current systems. Over several months, we collaborated closely with MEDITECH’s technical and commercial teams to tightly integrate Luma with Expanse, ensuring a friction-free experience for our mutual customers. 

Beta testing in a live customer environment

After thoroughly validating Luma’s functionality within Expanse, MEDITECH invited a healthcare provider, Phelps Memorial Health Center of Holdrege, Nebraska, to pilot Luma within the MEDITECH Greenfield Workspace program. Phelps Memorial Health Center partnered with MEDITECH and Luma Health to leverage MEDITECH’s implementation of the Argonaut FHIR scheduling APIs, creating powerful workflows for staff to more successfully connect with patients. 

This FHIR API-based approach to integration is benefitting patients by allowing them to intuitively schedule and manage their own appointments using apps developed within MEDITECH’s Greenfield Workspace environment. The result of this collaboration and integration is a “single pane of glass” into the patient experience and Luma-enabled touchpoints—all fully integrated into the MEDITECH Expanse experience.

“We are an organization committed to providing a quality patient experience. Collaborating with MEDITECH and Luma Health has empowered us to be adaptable in serving our community’s needs,” said Kurt Schmidt, Phelps Memorial’s director of electronic health records. “Using APIs has resulted in more efficient workflows and a better digital experience for patients who want immediate access to their care.”

Benefits for providers and patients alike

Phelps Memorial has experienced efficiency gains and improved patient experience by working directly with MEDITECH and Luma Health.  For example, 81% of patients now complete digital intake instead of in-office paper forms. 

Phelps Memorial is just one of the many healthcare systems now taking advantage of this deep integration, which uses MEDITECH Expanse APIs to connect appointment, demographic, and schedule data directly with Luma. Then, Luma sends rules-based text, email, and voice reminders to patients based on Luma Bedrock™ data-driven best practices.

When an appointment is confirmed through a Luma communication, the information is instantly sent back into MEDITECH, changing the appointment status to confirmed or canceled. This gives MEDITECH customers an up-to-the-second view of their day. Patients can also schedule their own appointments through Luma, and these appointments are immediately synced to MEDITECH’s scheduling module via MEDITECH Expanse APIs.

[RESOURCE] How Luma integrates with MEDITECH

Want to see how Luma can supercharge your MEDITECH Expanse platform? Book a discovery meeting.