I first knew about a standard for tracking adoption of electronic medical records(EMR) applications within hospitals and health systems while reading from a recent news article of an IT blog about how Advocate South Suburban Hospital, a Hazel Crest hospital in Illinois, USA was awarded a Stage 6 status based on this model. This prompted me to find out more about this model.
The EMR Adoption Model(EMRAM) is a methodology and algorithms to automatically score by evaluating the progress in a hospital’s IT-enabled clinical transformation status using EMRs.
EMRAM was developed in 2005 by HIMSS Analytics which is a wholly owned, not-for-profit subsidiary of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) using the HIMSS Analytics® Database originally derived from the Dorenfest IHDS+ Database™ in July, 2004.
Founded 51 years ago, HIMSS and its related organisations are headquartered in Chicago with additional offices in the United States and in Europe. Nearer home, HIMSS Analytics launched its Asian operations from their HIMSS Asia Pacific office located in Singapore. As on 14 June 2011, four Singapore hospitals have been awarded the Stage 6 EMRAM Award. No update is available for Malaysian hospitals from this link.
This HIMSS Analytics Database exclusive to HIMSS Analytics, is a comprehensive collection of data from thousands of institutions. It is a most comprehensive source for highly accurate healthcare provider IT market intelligence. The gathered data is used to create a realistic portrait of the health IT landscape – how hospitals are making the transition to paperless and what types of vendors and products they are using to get there.
Using this resourceful and authoritative database on EMR adoption trends, hospitals can track and review their progress in the levels of their EMR capabilities ranging from limited ancillary department systems through a paperless EMR environment.
Hospitals need to complete eight stages using the EMRAM,
i.e Stage 0 when a hospital has not installed all of the three key ancillary department systems (laboratory, pharmacy, and radiology) through Stage 7. The intent is to reach Stage 7, which represents an advanced electronic patient record environment, where paper charts are not used at all to deliver patient care.
For more information, visit www.himss.org and www.himssanalytics.org (each link opens in a new tab of your current window).
