New Jersey Hospital Picks HMS for Healthcare Apps

Published: August 21, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Mountainside Hospital, a 261-bed medical and surgical facility based in Montclair, New Jersey, is installing i5/OS applications from Healthcare Management Systems to help run its operations, HMS announced this month.

Following the purchase of Mountainside Hospital by Merit Health Systems in June, Merit committed to making $20 million in capital improvements in the northern New Jersey hospital, which was built more than 110 years ago and which employs 1,700 people. As part of that process, the hospital decided to stop outsourcing its clinical and financial management applications and instead run them in-house.

Merit CFO John Thompson says HMS was chosen due to the technical and management features of its integrated suite, in addition to being the best fit economically. The new software will also provide greater integration with existing systems, and help automate processes that were previously done by hand, he says.

"HMS offers an integration of systems that didn’t previously exist at Mountainside," Thompson says. "It will be a significant improvement over the current situation where multiple systems are not all interfaced."

HMS, which employs 380 people from its headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, sells a complete suite of integrated healthcare applications that runs entirely on the IBM System i server. The company has been targeting the midrange server since it was founded in 1984 by Tom Givens and John Doss. Today, HMS counts more than 575 users around the country, predominantly rural and community hospitals and other healthcare facilities.