Chase Farm Hospital (CFH), part of the Royal Free London (RFL) group, has been validated at Stage 6 of the HIMSS – owner of Healthcare IT News - Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) after an on-site assessment last week.
Over 2,500 hospitals in Europe have been assessed on the EMRAM, an eight-stage model measuring EMR capabilities and tracking the progress of healthcare organisations against others around the world.
The standards were updated at the beginning of January 2018 to reflect advances in the healthcare technology space, according to John Rayner, HIMSS Analytics regional director for Europe and Latin America.The Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) requirement, for example, is now part of the Stage 1 criteria, as opposed to Stage 5.
“In addition, areas of compliance have been increased to raise the bar and to acknowledge the importance of having these critical services hospital-wide, rather than in a single clinical area. As a result of these changes, some hospitals are likely to find achieving the higher stages of the model more challenging than they did prior to January 2018,” Rayner told Healthcare IT News in November last year.
In England, only two other NHS organisations have achieved Stage 6, Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust and Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and none have been validated at Stage 7 of the global standards. CUH was revalidated against the new Stage 6 standards last year.
Like Cambridge, RFL is part of the flagship NHS global digital exemplar scheme, through which it says that it has received £10m in matched funding – with the trust also putting in £10m – for new technology.
It is one of four NHS trusts selected to develop a so-called group model and help "share services and resources more effectively across hospitals", according to information provided by the trust.
“This digital approach is what the future of healthcare looks like and means a better experience for our patients and our staff. Now our aim is to further advance our use of technology so CFH can become a stage 7 hospital,” said in a statement Dr Chris Streather, chief medical officer of the RFL group.
Rayner said the HIMSS Analytics team was “particularly impressed with the amount of progress that has been in such a short time” after the Cerner Millennium go-live in November 2018. The new hospital opened to patients in September last year following a £200m redevelopment.
“I was particularly impressed with the degree of device integration within the operating theatres and the anaesthetic facilities. All the clinicians that we spoke with on the day maintained that the benefits of using electronic patient records far outweighed any benefits of working with paper systems. I left with the impression that there is commitment at all levels within this organisation to use technology to improve patient safety and the overall quality of clinical care,” Rayner added.
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.