Meditech is one of the oldest and largest healthcare IT vendors, founded in 1969. It has maintained independence and the same senior leadership for over 40 years. With over $500M in annual revenue and more than 2,300 clients worldwide, primarily hospitals, Meditech has three generations of software systems and a large installed base, especially in Canada. In the next episodes, the document's author will provide more details on each generation of Meditech's systems with help from a legal expert with decades of experience working at Meditech.

1. H.I.S.-toryby Vince Ciotti
Episode #83: Meditech Part 1
© 2012 by H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights reserved.

2. 7th of Today’s Leading HIS Vendors
• This week we continue the HIS-tory of today’s
vendors with Meditech, whose 2011 annual
revenue places them in the middle of the pack:
1. $3.2B = McKesson, née HBOC = Walt Huff, Bruce Barrington, & David
Owens
2. $2.2B = Cerner, still run by Neal Patterson, co-founded with Cliff Illig
3. $1.7B (est) = Siemens, née SMS: Jim Macaleer, Harvey Wilson & Clyde Hyde
4. $1.4B = Allscripts, née Eclipsys, also founded by Harvey Wilson of SMS.
5. $1.2B = Epic. Gee, I have to wonder, just who was it who founded them?
6. $900M (est) - GE Healthcare, née IDX/PHAMIS: created by Malcolm Gleser
7. $545M = Meditech, still run after all these years by Antonino Papallardo
8. $353M = NextGen: née Quality Systems Inc. founded by Sheldon Razin
9. $174M = CPSI, founded by M. Kenny Muscat & Denny P. Wilkins (who??)
10. $170M = QuadraMed, née Compucare, founded by Sheldon Dorenfest
11. $160M = Keane, parent giant by John Keane, but HIS div. built by Ray Paris
12. $110M = HMS (Healthcare Management Systems), Tom Givens & John Doss

3. 44 Years Ago!
• It’s hard to remember what life was like back in 1969, the year
Meditech was founded. To give you (relatively) young CIOs
some idea, here’s a few of the salient events of that year:
<- July 20th, Another Neil on the moon
August 8, Manson visits Sharon Tate ->
<- August 15, Woodstock mud festival
September 5, My Lai massacre ->
<- November 3, “Silent Majority” speech
Nude scene from “Oh Calcutta” ->
<- October, I join Shared Medical Systems
Neil Pappalardo forms Meditech ->

4. So What’s The Big Deal?
• You ask: “So what if Meditech is 44 years old?” Well, only a few
other HIS vendors go back that far, but none have survived being
acquired, and with the same (very!) senior management team.
• To get this point visually, check out the chart below that shows
the timeline for all 13 of today’s leading HIS vendors, showing the
year they were founded and major changes in ownership/name.
• Only 1 vendor has lasted so long under the same name: Meditech

5. More Perspective on Meditech
• I spent so much time building this silly chart that I have to make a
few more observations from it putting Meditech into perspective:
– Only 4 other of today’s 13 leading HIS vendors have never
been merged or acquired: Cerner, Epic, CPSI and HMS
– Two other vendors were formed in 1969: SMS &Compucare
– Only one other predates these 1969 graduates: Lockheed’s
MIS, although it changed hands six times before Allscripts…

6. Amazing Financial Performance
• Had Neil chosen to go public, it’s hard to imagine how many
gazillion he &Meditech’s employee stockholders would be worth
today. I could only find published records for Meditech starting in
1983, but look at the growth to today’s over ½ Billion in revenue:

7. Huge Client Base
• Meditech claims over 2,300 clients, although this figure needs to
be broken down into many sub-categories. Based on following
them over the years, here’s my best guess as to the breakdown:
– ≈400 International: UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia…
• In Canada alone, they claim 40% of the hospital market!
– ≈300 Partial: only a few Meditech applications, e.g.: LIS
• They are a major Lab player, e.g., UCLA kept their Meditech
LIS system rather than converting to Epic’s “Beaker”
– ≈200 HCA – who run a highly customized set of clinicals only
• HCA’s RCM and ERP financial are inhouse self-developed
– ≈1,300 HIS – US “total HIS” clients, on 3 different products:
• ≈650 (down from ≈700) still running the old Magic OS
• ≈450 (down from ≈500) running “Client Server”
• ≈300 on Focus, er, Release 6.0, er, Advanced Technology…

8. Which Generation?
• So whenever you’re talking about Meditech, it’s
important to specify which of their HIS systems
you’re talking about, as with so many vendors:
– McKesson – Is it the new Paragon, recently
sunset Horizon, or the aging Star or Series?
– Siemens– Is it red hot Soarian (with the most
R&D), or the aging Invision or Medseries4?
• And it’s not just which generation of HIS you’re talking about, it’s
which of vendor’s many products, some good and some not:
– Cerner– Is it their rocket-ship Millennium EMR, one of the few
competitors to Epic in the IDN market, or inaptly-named ProFit?
– Allscripts orNextGen– is it their industry leading Practice
Management and Ambulatory EMRs, or far less dominant HIS?
– Healthland’s Classic or Centriq? Keane’s PatCom or Optimum??
• The devil’s in these details, which too many HIS pundits gloss over…

9. Next Episodes
• So we will next delve into the details of each of
Meditech’s 3 systems in turn, thanks to help from:
– Bill O’Toole - If you’re a regular reader of HIS-
talk, you’ve seen a series of excellent articles on
legal matters by Bill who spent decades working
inside Meditech since 1981 before forming his
O’Toole Law Group (781/934-7400) in nearby
Duxbury, Mass. (wfo@otoolelawgroup.com).
• Also, Bill’s dad, William F. O’Toole, who was the
Pathologist at Cape Cod Hospital that became
Meditech’s first hospital client in 1971!
• I’m also eager to hear from any other Meditech
devotees out there, so if you have any good (or
bad…) Boston stories to tell, please call (505/466-
958) or write (vciotti@hispros.com).