MEDITECH’s Traverse Exchange connects Ontario hospitals and LTC

To help break down the silos of patient data and connect clinicians to the information they need, MEDITECH last year launched Traverse Exchange Canada in Ontario. The network now ties together 43 hospitals using MEDITECH, allowing them to more easily transfer data.

What’s more, the system is also connected to over 300 long-term care homes using PointClickCare and all 60 Oracle/Cerner EHR customers in Ontario via the Oracle eHub. Connections to hospitals running on Epic have now begun.

“We’re committed to reducing the burden on physicians,” said Mike Cordeiro, senior director of interoperability market and product strategy at MEDITECH. “We want to eliminate data fragmentation barriers.”

Cordeiro emphasized that just connecting clinicians to data isn’t always the solution. It must be done in a way that helps their workflow and doesn’t add to their problems.

“You don’t want to simply give them 30 pages of patient data. You want to provide them with answers to their questions,” he noted.

To this end, MEDITECH has been working with its partners in Ontario to deploy the network in an intelligent way. By using the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Standard), they’re able to provide more refined searches and exchanges of data for clinicians.

“By using FHIR, the system is much more searchable,” said Cordeiro. Leveraging this FHIR framework, the company is also working with its partners on complementary AI use cases to support advanced search and clinical summarization features.

One of the Ontario hospitals that’s been using Traverse Exchange Canada network is Southlake Health, which serves northern York Region and southern Simcoe County in Ontario.

Sam Fielding, chief information officer, explained that the hospital joined in 2024 as part of Project AMPLIFI, a provincially funded effort designed to promote interoperability in the healthcare sector. He said hospital clinicians have started to use it, and he sees “a massive amount of potential in it.”

Fielding said most of the traffic on the network has been between the hospital and surrounding nursing homes, as they send patients back and forth.

Most of these nursing homes are using the PointClickCare electronic patient record system, and Traverse Exchange enables data to flow directly from PointClickCare into the hospital’s MEDITECH system and vice versa.

“It wouldn’t be possible without Traverse Exchange Canada,” said Fielding. “Traverse Exchange is the critical infrastructure that sits in the middle. It’s the hub of the data exchange.”

He said that most of the data exchange consists of patient summaries – key information about the patient’s medications, allergies, vaccinations, and problem lists. It’s necessary when patients are transferred from long-term care to hospital or hospital to LTC so that clinicians can make accurate diagnoses.

Fielding said more data is now starting to flow between Southlake and other regional hospitals. Southlake, Oak Valley Health, and Stevenson Memorial Hospital (they share a common MEDITECH instance) have also been working with Mackenzie Health to flow critical patient data between MEDITECH and Epic, connecting hospital patient data across York Region and southern Simcoe County.

“We share a lot of patients and there are a lot of transfers,” said Fielding. “The exchange of data in these cases becomes critical.”

He explained that reports can now be sent digitally between the hospitals – a big change from how things worked until recently. “We used to use fax, or we’d sometimes attach a patient chart and send it with the patient.”