At the annual ViVE conference, held last week in Los Angeles, Healthcare Innovation sat down with MEDITECH’s chief marketing and nursing executive, Cathy Turner, and Eric Gasser, VP of Information Systems and CIO with Wooster Community Hospital, to discuss technology, rural health needs, and artificial intelligence (AI).

During the exhibition, MEDITECH, a Massachusetts-based software company, highlighted its cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) platform, Expanse.

Eric, could you provide some background on yourself and Wooster Community Hospital?

Eric: My background is clinical. I was a registered nurse…and then I fell into clinical informatics. I helped install an EMR (electronic medical records) and fell in love with the idea. I came to Wooster Community Hospital back in 2006 as a clinical systems analyst. Throughout my journey, my career has progressed.

Wooster is a 173-bed hospital. We're just celebrating our 75th anniversary. We have a wide range of services that we provide, both inpatient and outpatient, cancer care, surgery...

I heard you are opening a new emergency room (ER)?

Eric: Yes, it's a new front entrance to the hospital. We've been focused on patient access. So one aspect of patient access is how you get into the hospital. One is through the digital front door, and one is through the emergency room. A lot of our admissions come through the emergency room. Our emergency room has been there for 75 years. It's been remodeled, but it was built for 15,000 visits a year. We're around 30,000, so you can imagine that the space is kind of cramped.

The front entrance of the hospital is designed so people can get in, get registered, and get some of the things they need done right at the front, without having to go through the bowels of the hospital, if you will.

We're also working on digital access to the hospital. And that's another thing that I'm working on that I'm passionate about

Speaking of digital access, what does your organization do to address rural healthcare challenges?

Eric: Rural healthcare is very important. Some people may not realize the importance of having rural hospitals or community hospitals, such as critical access hospitals. We're fiercely independent. We feel that it's best for our community if we're independent, because who better to care for the people in our community than the people who live and work there?

We think staying independent is important, because if you get acquired by a larger organization, what tends to happen is, is that they don't want to lose money. They take those services out of a community that are not making money, and that causes patients…to have to go further for the care that they need. If you're having a stroke or a heart attack or you want to deliver a baby, you'd much rather do that in your own community.

It's important that we're appropriately funded. There's been $50 billion allocated over five years through that Big, Beautiful Bill. That's being divided up among the 50 states. Half of that money, $25 billion, is given to the states, 5 billion divided equally, and then the other half we have to apply for. Ohio got $202 million in 2026, and now, Ohio is trying to figure out how to spend that money. Those initiatives are still kind of unknown. We don't know how that money is going to come to us. How much is going to come to us? Some of this will be helpful. It's intended to help educate the workforce and to have more caregivers available in rural communities. The desire is to provide better quality care and access to our community.

How do you use technology to address rural health challenges?

Eric: When it makes sense, we partner with other larger health systems that can help us deliver care to our patients. We partner with the Ohio State Medical Center in Columbus. We partner with them on a couple of things. One of them is our Stroke Program. If you have a patient that's coming into the hospital and they're having a stroke, we can put a telehealth computer into the room with a camera and connect to a neurologist. That neurologist is available 24/7 — that'd be hard for us to provide at a cost-effective rate. Through telehealth, using technology, we can have the neurologist connect in, examine the patient, and tell us what needs to be done for that patient. And Ohio State partners with, I think, around 26 hospitals in the state with a similar program. We have the fastest door-to-needle time for those patients who need a clot-busting drug, a blood clot that stops blood flow to the brain.

Cathy, let’s turn to you. Can you tell me about your organization?

Cathy: We’re an EHR company. We were founded by Neil Pappalardo, who was really a pioneer in the industry, and his mission was to be able to provide affordable, advanced technology to all healthcare organizations, regardless of size. The small organizations deserve the same technology as large organizations. We've been around for, I think, 56 years now. We've not strayed from that mission, although we have organizations of every size that use our software.

Could you talk a little about the Expanse platform MEDITECH is featuring?

Cathy: Expanse is a fully web-based platform. It was designed with clinicians in mind, to mimic their workflow so that it would not add more effort to their job. It was designed to enable what they do. That web-based platform was designed at a time when really meaningful use was coming into play. It was not a great time to be rewriting your system. We knew it had to be done, and we knew that by doing that, it would afford us the ability to take advantage of other technologies that come out.

Take AI, for example, which is very fast-moving and has changed rapidly over the last two years. You can't do anything without picking up on the latest AI. That has enabled us to embed it within workflows across healthcare organizations. Not only for the providers, but also for the nurses and physicians that can make their jobs easier; things like ambient listening…not only capturing the essence of the conversation, but also then captioning discrete data that needs to be used for trending or data analysis.

It's things like that that allow us to embed that kind of technology across our software so that we really do provide for that better safety, efficiency, and security for the individuals that are using it. Not only on the clinical side. Certainly, there are many administrative capabilities you want to leverage as well. AI things that I identify when a bill might get rejected, for instance, because you didn't code it at the highest level; things like identifying no-shows for patients, because if this patient has a history of no-show or likelihood of not showing up, that has an economic impact; identifying outreach.

By creating the web-based platform, it allows us to take technology, at the top and bottom of the Health Information System (HIS) and provide everybody who uses the EHR with better capabilities.

You brought up a good point: AI is so fast-moving. What kind of developments are you seeing?

Cathy: AI is the latest. We took a very careful, measured approach to that. We didn't throw everything at the wall just to be able to say we were doing AI. We believe that when you create one tool, it should apply to many, so that you're not dealing with 250 different tools just to make life easier, more sophisticated, or more intuitive for the people who are using it. We really identified what makes sense: Anybody that is using the system, whether it's a clinician, a biller, a coder, or an administrative person — what within their workflow could take advantage of AI. Also, for the patients, as they're using the patient portal. What we call My Health has a My Health assistant that helps them navigate that portal.

Eric: AI is coming at us fast and furious. There are so many people here who are telling us how their AI can solve our problems.

Ambient listening…is one of the things that a lot of us are doing. We've been piloting a couple of different options. We're ready to try to select one. But because things are happening so quickly, you don't want to lock yourself into a long-term contract, because something might change that's different that you might want to go with. I think what we want to do is try to find ways to allow our caregivers to do what they want to do…and that's take care of patients. When you put computers in their way, that distract them from what they're trying to do, that's not good. Something like ambient listening is good, where they can focus on talking to the patient and not worry about getting the information into the computer.

We have to find ways to do more with less work. There are fewer and fewer workers available to do the work that we do. We have to find ways to get rid of anything that's manual and allow them to do as much as possible at their highest level. If they're entering data but have a skill set beyond that, how do we take that away from them?

Technology is something we can find, whether it's using AI, robotic process automation, or some kind of agent that helps with that; we have to find ways to make it more efficient. With healthcare, the same person that is responsible for one thing is probably responsible for 5 to 10 other things. How do we help these people continue to do more with less, with technology?

Cathy: The other thing is data leveraging. There is so much data that is collected as a byproduct of the patient experience, but we don't do a good job of using all of it. Not only from an analytics perspective, but it's that data that AI relies on. Truly being able to take better advantage of it for those situations, but also for the sharing of data.

Eric just mentioned the other organizations he works with, and those organizations need some of that data; that clean exchange of data, so that wherever the patient is being seen, they have that previous history of information, so the clinician in front of them can provide the proper care.

Yes, sometimes data can be scattered across systems, right?

Eric: Meditech has something called Traverse that enables the sharing of data. Sometimes we hear the excuse, "We can't send the patient to Wooster hospital because…we won't be able to see those results." That's not true because we're all connected now. If a patient comes to us, we're able to get their records from wherever they've been. If they need to go somewhere else, they will be able to get those records from us. This interoperability that we've been chasing for a long time, although it's not perfect, Meditech has really stepped up and helped enable that.

Is there any advice you have for healthcare leaders?

Cathy: Leverage what you own. There are a lot of organizations that have not taken advantage of everything. Start there, and then as additional things come out, they are often built on that foundation that you've already built. You've got to take advantage of those things that are there, and sometimes that's hard because it's change management. You might have to do additional training when something new comes out, or when you haven't taken advantage of something. There's a lot in the system that can work to facilitate people's work, as opposed to hindering it. They have to take advantage of it.

Eric: We need to work together. We don't have all the answers. It's important to network and get to know your peers, CIOs, and vendors in the community. We're all trying to solve a common problem: taking care of patients in our communities. And one of the best ways to do that is to ask questions and to help each other out. It’s kind of what we're doing here at ViVE. We're here to learn from each other and see what we can do to improve the care given in our communities.