The Dallas, Texas-based Children’s Medical Center has been named a 2013 Enterprise HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence winner, the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) announced.
Since 1994, the Nicholas E. Davies Award has recognized excellence in the use of health information technology, specifically the use of the electronic health record (EHR) to successfully improve healthcare delivery processes and patient safety while achieving a demonstrated return on investment.
Winning enterprise organizations include academic medical centers, community hospitals, rural health hospitals and critical-access hospitals. These organizations must demonstrate the value of the EHR in supporting the delivery of patient care and as well as document improved patient outcomes, identify the challenges faced, and describe the solutions implemented in a manner that can be replicated by other organizations, according to HIMSS officials. Winners of the HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award must have achieved Stage 6 or Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model.
Founded in 1913, the not-for-profit Children’s Medical Center is the fifth-largest pediatric health care provider in the country. The Medical Center has nearly 700,000 patient admissions and visits annually with 595 licensed beds at its two full-service campuses in Dallas and Plano, multiple specialty clinics and 16 primary care MyChildren’s locations. Children’s was the state’s first pediatric hospital to achieve Level I Trauma status and is the only pediatric teaching facility in North Texas, affiliated with UT Southwestern Medical Center, its officials say.
Children’s Medical Center introduced a concept for pediatric care when the organization embedded clinical pathways into hospital workflows using its EHR. The goal was to decrease variation in care, and improve patient outcomes and the quality of care. The use of pathways for bronchiolitis, asthma and appendicitis (as examples) has reportedly resulted in significantly improved patient outcomes.
“Given how sensitive clinical treatment of children can be because of many factors, e.g., their age, their weight, the use of clinical pathways in pediatric care processes is ‘unchartered waters’ to a certain extent,” Janis Curtis, chair, Davies Enterprise Committee, and business relationship management executive at Duke University Health System, said in a statement. “What Children’s has done in this regard, and the positive clinical outcomes achieved, is indeed commendable.”
Most recently, the Sacramento, Calif.-based 619-bed University of California-Davis Medical Center was named a 2013 Davies Award winner. All winners will be recognized at the 2013 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Fla. on February 23-27, 2014.
