Few hospitals reach HIMSS Stage 7 EHR ranking

Thirteen hospitals have been named by HIMSS Analytics as tops in the nation in that organization’s latest ratings of hospital information technology systems adoption.
All 13 hospitals named as the first ever to achieve the highest rating of Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model came from two hospital systems, Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, which had 12 hospitals on the list, and NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston, Ill., which had three of its four campuses honored. All 13 have products from Epic Systems Corp., Verona., Wis., at the core of their clinical healthcare IT systems.
Last month, HIMSS Analytics announced that 42 hospitals had reached Stage 6 of its model. The model was developed in 2004 as a way for the industry to measure the penetration of electronic health-record systems in hospitals. The scale runs from zero to 7. HIMSS Analytics is the data analysis arm of the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society
Practitioners at Stage 7 hospitals can deliver patient care without paper charts, share standardized summaries of patient records with other providers, use their clinical databases to drive performance improvement efforts, including outcomes research, and offer examples of “best practices” in EHR implementation and clinician engagement with their IT systems.

Source: Modern Healthcare, March 10, 2009