Northwestern Medical Center's Transition to MEDITECH 6.16 - a Few Words ...


Hello, my name is Jodi Frei. I am the Manager of Organizational Informatics at Northwestern Medical Center (NMC), a forward thinking community based hospital in northern Vermont. I am also the Project Manager for NMC's transition from MEDITECH 6.07 to 6.16. We take our mission of providing exceptional care to the community seriously, and we understand how valuable the MEDITECH EMR is in this process. 

NMC decided to move forward as early adopters for 6.16, Web Acute/ED, as a means of transitioning our ED from a best in breed product to MEDITECH.  We embraced the idea of being a part of future MEDITECH physician module build.

Physicians use the EMR to view patient data, order, and, document. NMC's providers, both Acute and ED, have had numerous opportunities as early adopters, to provide feedback to MEDITECH's development team in regard to 6.16 functionality that impacts these three functions: viewing data, ordering, and documenting. 

MEDITECH recently invited three NMC providers on site to explore the new system, to simulate patient scenarios, and to provide valuable insight as to how intuitive the system was to be built. This was a great opportunity for our providers. Now when other NMC providers ask me who built the Web Acute/ED platform, I am pleased to respond that many physicians, including our own, helped to build the product.


WebAcute/ED is only a portion of our journey to 6.16. We are working closely with MEDITECH to implement new functionality, new workflows, and new communication means all associated with 6.1. We are also using this as an opportunity to rethink the build and workflow that we put in place with our big bang MEDITECH go live in 2010 (to 6.0). There are lots of moving parts. We are managing conversions, report rewrites, interface testing, rebuilt modules, updated modules, and a completely new build for our ED.  

We are doing all of this amidst a major master facility/construction project that is growing our facility in exciting ways. The transition to 6.1 requires focus, attention to detail and deadlines, collaboration at all levels, openness to change, and positive attitudes. I am proud to say that NMC is delivering on all of the above!

Stay tuned for details on a fall MUSE Site Visit to NMC so you can see and hear about the 6.16 details first-hand! 

Jodi Frei, PT, MSMIIT
Manager of Clinical Informatics
Northwestern Medical Center
St Albans, VT 05478
(802) 524-1269