NYU Langone Health, Petaluma Health Center Win HIMSS Davies Awards

NYU Langone Health in New York has received the 2017 global Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Enterprise Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence for healthcare technology innovations that improve patient outcomes. Petaluma Health Center, a federally qualified health center in Sonoma County, California, received the 2017 Community Health HIMSS Davies Award.

HIMSS credited NYU Langone for its continual optimization of electronic health record systems and processes. It noted that inspired by feedback from its patients, NYU Langone developed a tablet-based registration solution that allowed patients to review documents in their preferred languages before electronically signing them. This documentation then became instantaneously and securely available throughout the health system, averting needless duplication of effort.

HIMSS said that implementation of paperless registration led to multiple improvements at NYU Langone. The health system saved:

• an estimated 800 days of registration time for patients;
• almost $450,000 in annual expense due to reduced registration time; and
• close to 527 trees based on reduction in paper usage.

NYU Langone has also derived significant value from creating electronic clinical pathways for heart failure, pneumonia, and colon surgery as well as care coordination systems for joint replacement and cardiovascular surgery.

“At NYU Langone Health, we view technology as a critical element in connecting our patients and providers, and transforming care,” said Nader Mherabi, senior vice president and vice dean, chief information officer at NYU Langone Health, in a prepared statement. “Our goal has always been to create a seamless patient experience across the institution's complex network of facilities and locations and securely manage volumes of health records. We’re proud that the hard work we’ve put towards improving patient care has been recognized through this prestigious award.”

Petaluma Health Center (PHC) provides health care services to 35,000 patients in Sonoma County each year. HIMSS noted that PHC successfully uses its EHR and analytics platform to drive decisions and support its care teams’ management of population health, while also improving clinical outcomes.

“In our community, heart disease and stroke are a real problem,” explained Danielle Oryn, M.D., chief medical informatics officer at PHC, in a statement. “In 2013, 25 percent of deaths in Sonoma County were attributed to heart disease and stroke.” PHC set a goal to decrease the number of heart attacks and strokes within their patient population by improving hypertension control. The organization’s plan of action included construction of standard clinical guidelines into their EHR, as well as providing real-time data to care teams about blood pressure control. This allowed teams to create individualized plans for each patient.

Petaluma has established a culture where they bring clinical performance data directly to their providers in order to generate real-time information for quality improvement, noted Jonathan French, senior director of quality and patient safety, and director of the Davies Award of Excellence Program for HIMSS, in a statement. “Petaluma’s use of technology promotes quality improvement efforts while hard-coded applications help reduce costs by enabling providers to select inexpensive medication alternatives,”

Petaluma Health Center and NYU Langone Health will be recognized at the HIMSS18 Awards Gala at Wynn Hotel Las Vegas on Thursday, March 8, 2018.