10 Dec Q&A: MEDITECH CEO on more than 40 years of healthcare change
Our entire industry, for the last 20 years, treated clinicians as if they were desktop workers
Founded in 1969 to develop software to assist in hospital labs, MEDITECH company has since expanded its portfolio and revenue to $514 million in 2014, and expanded its solutions across the clinical workflows and across the continuum of care.
According to MEDITECH, its solutions are used by more than 250,000 physicians, who keep records of more than 100 million people at 2,300 or so hospitals and thousands of ambulatory settings as well.
Howard Messing has been with the company since 1974 when he joined as a developer. CEO since 2010, he spoke recently with Healthcare IT News about the need to simplify life for his customers and help drive the industry toward a next generation of enhanced software, interoperable across care settings. Here’s what he had to say.
On making software since 1969
MEDITECH has been a provider in this space for 46 years. We have seen our growth start from the very early days to today, where we find ourselves providing a comprehensive [electronic health record] and all the other associated pieces that go along with that. Over that history, we’ve managed to prove ourselves as a cost-effective and safe EHR for the entire healthcare continuum.
On the fact that Epic and Cerner aren’t the only game in town
If you look both at our market share and our successes over the last few years, we can disprove that. I think a lot of that has to do the fact that we have not in the past been in the big university hospitals. But when you have well over a quarter of the marketplace in terms of facility, it is hard to say that you are not a player. We have a quarter of the acute care facilities and many of the associated ambulatory with that. We have about 26 percent of the U.S. market and about 40 percent of the Canadian market.