Meditech has launched a new offering for its critical access hospital customers: Meditech-as-a-Service, a cloud-based EHR that's available through a monthly subscription.

MaaS aims to offer smaller hospitals a way to improve process efficiency and drive quality improvement, giving them a cost-effective, modern EHR system with simplified contracting, officials said.

[Also: Meditech to launch CommonWell data-sharing capabilities in 2018]

With MaaS, Meditech is joining other cloud-based electronic health records vendors, such as athenahealth and eClinicalWorks, with subscription options geared for smaller hospitals. Epic revealed earlier this year its plans to develop new versions for the same market segment as well but has yet to state the timeframe for those products becoming available.

Meditech, which said it will run MaaS out of a centrally-hosted private cloud infrastructure, will maintain responsibility for upgrades and ongoing maintenance of the system.

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The suite of tools includes Meditech's Web EHR, equipped with clinical decision support,  revenue cycle, patient access capabilities and more. The company said critical access hospitals should be able to roll out and go-live with the cloud-based systems in about six months.

"Reducing the complexity and cost of procuring and maintaining an EHR will allow these hospitals to focus their resources on patient care, productivity, and meeting regulations," said Meditech President and CEO Howard Messing in a statement.

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