Top EMR hospitals also top U.S. News & World Report list
More than 100 hospitals appearing in the online July 19 edition of the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals and Best Children’s Hospitals 2011-2012 received Stage 6 and 7 recognition by the HIMSS Analytics' EMR Adoption Model (EMRAM) scale.

HIMSS Analytics created the EMRAM scale to track EMR adoption rates and trends in progress at hospitals and health systems. EMRAM scores hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics database on their progress in completing the 8 stages to creating a paperless patient record environment.

The EMRAM scores follow these objectives:
  • All application capabilities within each stage must be operational before that stage can be achieved.
  • All lower stages must have been achieved before a higher level will be considered as achieved.
  • A hospital can achieve Stages 3 to 6 if it has met all of the application requirements for a single patient care service (e.g., single nursing floor, cardiology service).
  • Using these rules, additional points are given for the implementation of applications in stages higher than the one fully achieved by the healthcare organization. In this way, other implementation paths than those prescribed by the stages can be taken into consideration for correlation with quality and financial research.

As noted on the U.S. News & World Report website, “Each (hospital) is distinguished by having captured a national ranking in the 2011 to 2012 rankings or by having earned the designation of ‘high-performing’ in one or more medical specialties. And each hospital, or one or more of its units – such as a children's hospital within a larger institution must be a leader in moving to EMRs, according to HIMSS Analytics, a division of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which analyzes use of health IT.

A place on the Best Hospitals Honor Roll is reserved for hospitals that show high expertise across multiple specialties, scoring at or near the top in at least six of 16 specialties. Just 17 of the almost 5,000 hospitals who were evaluated for the 2011 to 2012 rankings qualified. Hospitals with the highest scores in a given specialty received two honor roll points; those with slightly lower scores received one point. Honor Roll standings were determined by the number of Honor Roll points across all 16 specialties.

U.S. News & World Report surveyed nearly 180 pediatric centers about their clinical data and asked 1,500 physicians in 10 pediatric specialties where they would send their sickest children. In all, 76 hospitals ranked in one or more specialties. Eleven hospitals with high scores in at least four specialties were named to this year's Best Children’s Hospital Honor Roll.

View more details on the survey, here.
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