August 8, 2019

They say it’s your birthday!! CloudWave Congratulates MEDITECH for 50 Years of Innovation

The year was 1968 when four new companies were founded and each subsequently delivered great invention, innovation, and value for Healthcare over the next fifty years. They say hindsight is 20/20 and I have the benefit of having had a front-row seat for 40 of MEDITECH’s 50 years in business.

Each of the four companies founded in 1968 would forever be entwined with healthcare software, healthcare technology, and healthcare delivery. I’ve already mentioned the first one – MEDITECH, Medical Information Technology, Inc. The other three companies formed in 1968 include Intel Corporation, Data General Corporation, and HCA, (Healthcare Corporation of America). All four of these companies delivered great value to the business of healthcare including hardware and software technology, patient care, and medical instrumentation. It is not coincidental that these three companies were a complement to MEDITECH’s success.

Data General entered the market in 1968 with inexpensive 16-bit computers. Multiple healthcare companies including MEDITECH, HBOC/McKesson, and GE Medical leveraged Data General computer hardware and then began to leverage the Data General CLARiiON storage array. CLARiiON was an early commercial example of a raid storage product and was sold with the Intel-powered AViiON computer systems. Later the CLARiiON became an open system storage attachment for virtually any computing platform. MEDITECH and HBOC built hospital information systems, and GE Medical built CT Scanners, Magnetic Resonance Imaging systems with Data General systems. Data General was acquired by EMC who was then acquired by Dell Technologies. All delivered a legacy of value for healthcare and MEDITECH customers.

Intel Corporation was founded in 1968 and brought great standardization to desktops, network connections, and servers and is one half of the Intel duopoly that has driven a great majority of server replication models and storage back-ends. Other monolithic computer systems were based on UNIX and variants of UNIX that also standardized on Intel. Intel emerged as the standard commodity compute engine that drove thousands of new startups, software products, and value for healthcare. If you were building a new piece of software, you no longer needed to go out and pick a proprietary chipset and operating system. Intel has taken a great deal of cost out IT for healthcare over the years. The reality is that software innovation is constant, and Intel is one of the companies that drove price-performance capable of making all the new functionality affordable.

HCA Healthcare was founded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1968 by Dr. Thomas Frist. Over the years HCA has owned and managed hundreds of hospitals. In the mid-1990’s Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation began installing the MEDITECH hospital information system in all of their hospitals. Today HCA helps local communities of care thrive and services 28 million patient encounters a year.

Now I think I can go out on a limb and say that MEDITECH at 50 years old supports over 50 million patient encounters a year.

Going forward, the MEDITECH innovation cycle continues to deliver even more value with web technologies, quality management, patient engagement, ambulatory integration, and cloud delivery.

Thank you MEDITECH.

https://ehr.meditech.com/news/meditech-celebrates-50-years-of-healthcare-technology-innovation

When Peter Stone, President & CEO is not working at CloudWave, he can be found in the sand dunes of Wellfleet, Massachusetts.