Stage 7 HIMSS EMR Stage Still Elusive in 2010

As a journalist I get to speak on a daily basis to people doing amazing technological feats with their organizations, agencies, and associations in the pursuit of improving patient care. Just this week I spoke with Seth Foldy, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Informatics and Technology Program Office, as well as Debra Konicek, M.S.N., R.N., managing director, College of American Pathologists, about a new grant-funded program to electronically link hospital labs and public health agencies. (Check back next week for the full report and podcast.) I also talked with VikasJain, M.D., chief resident, University of Oklahoma, Department of Family Medicine, about he and his colleagues using a secure mobile service to text message each other regarding patient care via smartphones. They can also look up contact information for primary care physicians and specialists to aid in transitions of care for their patients.HIMSS EMR Adoption Model By having all of these amazing conversations, I forget what a small percentage of hospitals and healthcare organizations are actually using a complete electronic health record, sharing patient information via a CCD, using a data warehouse, and linking up ED and ambulatory to the central EMR. The slide below from the HIMSSEMR Adoption Model further emphasizes this fact—the first numerical column shows the percentage of organizations who have reached a particular EMR adoption stage by 2010 Q3, and the second numerical column shows the final stats for 2010. I was really surprised to see that only 1 percent of the country is at Stage 7. And this is up three-tenths of a point from last year, when 37 hospitals achieved the highest maturity rating. About half of the country’s healthcare organizations (49 percent) are at Stage 3, having implemented nursing/clinical documentation, CDSS, and utilizing PACS outside of radiology.Seeing this slide and other similar studies was definitely the wake-up call I needed to realize that even though the goal of this magazine is to share the best practices and lessons learned from organizations in the upper stages of the adoption model, there are still a majority of other organizations just embarking on their meaningful use journey. Please share your stories below in a comment, and tell us where you’re at.