Aaron Berdofe, MHI – Health Informatics

At 10am central today, the staff of LSS Data Systems was told that their company will be acquired by their giant partner, MEDITECH pending board approval in February.  This ends years of speculation about how MEDITECH would fully enter the ambulatory market.  A month after I started at LSS in July 2005, I made the prediction that MEDITECH would make the purchase within 5 years.  I missed it by 6 months. 

Some quick Q&A (my conjectures of course):

What will change immediately for their clients?  Nothing.  Eventually your invoices will go to Massachusetts, I’m sure, but MEDITECH has stated they will be retaining the Minnesota staff and offices for the time being.

How will the product be different for MAGIC and C/S customers?  It won’t be.  You’ve all been getting the “That change won’t happen until 6.0” answers, right?

Will the level of service change?  Probably not.  LSS and MEDITECH staff had numerous ways of communicating prior to the acquisition including the same e-mail and task management system.  However, this may alert more MEDITECH employees that an ambulatory product actually exists, is coded in the MEDITECH language and isn’t some third-party vendor that they’ve never heard of.

What can be expected of the future ambulatory product?  Since MEDITECH will fully take over the reins of the Medical and Practice Management Suite, overall, it will just be more MEDITECH-y.  Some things might be designed with a little more care, but LSS mimicked MEDITECH anyway so I wouldn’t expect a highly acclaimed ambulatory product to appear right out of the gates.  As pointed out by Anthony Guerra at Information Week, the lack of ambulatory market penetration of LSS was not necessarily a result of not having a different name than MEDITECH attached over the product.