Children’s National Health System Achieves Stage 6 Recognition from HIMSS Analytics

Children’s National Health System has been recognized by HIMSS Analytics for reaching Stage 6 status on the EMR Adoption Model (EMRAM), an achievement reached by only 32 percent of the nation’s more than 5,400 hospitals.

Through the Children’s National Bear Institute, a pediatric health information technology division designed to provide value-driven care, the Washington, D.C.-based health system seeks to foster innovation and create a world-class IT structure in order to accelerate clinical advancement. From computerized provider order entry to electronic clinician documentation, decision support, positive patient identification through bar coding and numerous other initiatives, Children’s National is building critical IT infrastructure to support care delivery, quality and safety.

“The HIMSS Analytics Stage 6 designation is a strong indication of our commitment to the proper utilization of health information technology to achieve the highest levels of patient safety and quality and care delivery,” Brian Jacobs, M.D., CIO and EVP for the Center for Pediatric Informatics, Children’s National Health System, said in a statement.

“HIMSS Analytics congratulates Children’s National Health System for making significant progress towards achieving advanced health IT adoption,” John H. Daniels, global vice president, HIMSS Analytics, said. “Stage 6 represents a level of sophistication that can lead to innovative health care transformation.”

HIMSS Analytics’ EMR Adoption Model (EMRAM) provides a strategic roadmap and guidance along an 8-stage model with comparisons to healthcare organizations in the same country and around the world.

The Stage 6 recognition is reserved for hospitals that have made executive commitments and investments and appear to have a significant advantage over competitors for patient safety, clinician support, clinician recruitment and competitive marketing for both consumers and nurse recruitment. In addition, Stage 6 hospitals must be fully automated (with paperless medical records) when they have implemented their IT applications across most of the inpatient care settings; have started creating strategic alignments with their medical staff to effectively utilize information technology to improve the patient safety information; and be well positioned to provide data to key stakeholders, such as payers, the government, physicians, consumers and employers, to support electronic health record environments and health information exchanges.