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meditech is the computer programme used by various hospitals for the complete documentation of the care. It is used by all the departments of the hospital not only nursing. It is the constant copmanion for the nurses as all your work are documented in this. It begins with your shift assessment and goes through medication scanning and administration,vitl signs, I&O, IV insertion, care plan, Physician notification and even the lab results and contact numbers...It helps to document all the matters and trace them back. Personaly speaking, I love this system. Its easy to work with once you know all the fields...
meditech isnt computer charting. in my opinion, its a slow, user-unfriendly system. but basically it houses all patient information, including lab results, diagnostic tests. and it keeps all information from past visits. so you can compare past labwork to present, etc. you can enter orders (diet orders, consults, bloodwork, tests, etc), cancel orders, send msgs to certain depts.
it's an ok system...and its easy to learn...but it can be a pain sometimes. lol. if you want to get some experience...check around at some local community colleges (anywhere where there's medical programs like nursing, technologists, etc). they might offer a class in it. i know my college does. its only a short course (a few classes). but it does get you familiar with it.
My hospital has been using meditech now since last January, Has not been an easy road, if any of you have used it yet. Alot of BUGS to be worked out still:madface: . We have had 2 "redo's" on the system itself to make it work for us. I know change is hard for all, and inevitable, and I like the computer charting, I just got to say, when a hospital is looking for an up to date charting system, this one may not be your best choice.
I hate meditech. To me there is too many steps to charting and entering orders. I find it incredibly confusing. I have used it at 3 different hospitals now. The one I work at and two for clinicals and at one hospital they had 2 different versions that I know of depending on what floor you were on. JMHO...
There are two Meditech versions.
Magic is the older version which is not truly GUI and the newer one is Client/Server (referred to as CS often) which is graphical and much easier to use.
I think this is why we may have such a love hate when talking about Meditech.
I bet the people using CS love it.
We must use the dinosaur version because it is not user friendly.
It's hit or miss if you can find any forms you need to print out. No one seems to know or remember where anything is stored.
Someone had changed the wording of the desktop icon on many of the computers to read "Mediocre" instead of "Meditech". I got a kick out of that.
How appropriate.
You can get the hang of it, but it's not user friendly at all in my opinion. The version we have is DOS based, not windows based so it's a PITA.
Our original 2 page nurses notes in the OR turned into 25 screens on Meditech. And you had better "file" your work after each step or you may loss it.
nursejllrn
56 Posts
What does it mean when a job ad says "Must have meditech." Is that computer charting? We still paper chart where I work, and I would like to travel in the future but almost all ads say must have meditech. Please clarify for me. Thanks