Electronic Health Records (EHR, EMR)

Military health leaders from Australia, Singapore & the UK came together at the inaugural International Military Health IT plenary at HIMSS AsiaPac 18 in Brisbane to discuss the key challenges in their respective military health systems.

The company will be combined with Veritas-owned Virence Health, but will continue operating under the athenahealth name and keep its Watertown, Massachusetts, headquarters. Virence CEO Bob Segert will lead it.

John Daniels, VP of HIMSS Analytics, says there is more to digitizing an organization than installing EMR functions, and discusses other adoption and maturity models including artificial intelligence, continuity of care and infrastructure.

Pacific Dental Services, the first dental support organization to implement Epic's comprehensive health record, will leverage the technology to improve care coordination.

With IT deployments broadening and deepening worldwide, a new report assesses unique preferences in Canada, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and AsiaPac countries.

Ten UK health tech start-ups to receive £40,000 through KQ accelerator Ten UK start-ups working at the intersection of biomedical and data science have now been selected to take part in the £400,000, 16-week KQ (Knowledge Quarter) Labs accelerator run by the Francis Crick Institute in London, meant to speed up development and adoption of data-driven technologies addressing global health challenges. Vision Game Labs, which is creating home-monitoring and remote-diagnosis vision kits for smartphones, using gaming techniques to gather visual data and diagnose eye disease, is one of the start-ups that will receive £40,000 to validate their business proposals through the programme, which is funded by Innovate UK, before looking for further investment. “The start-ups all have the potential to make an impact on global health outcomes and will have access to unrivaled support and resources. “These ventures will help shape the future of health in a sector that is a vital part of the government’s modern Industrial Strategy,” said Chris Sawyer, Innovation Lead, Digital Health at Innovate UK. Ireland’s largest acute hospital finalises Cerner Millennium implementation Ireland’s St James’s Hospital has now completed the rollout of the Cerner EPR, with every inpatient specialty and department going live with upgraded Millennium functionality in a programme labelled “Project Oak” – referencing the move away from paper-based processes. The functionality is set to reduce duplication and allow quicker access to clinical information, with 2,400 staff members receiving more than 21,000 hours of training ahead of the implementation, according to the supplier. “We are in the early stages of the launch, but careful planning has ensured that patient care has not been disrupted significantly over the weekend,” said Dr. Gráinne Courtney, Chief Clinical Information Officer at St James’s Hospital. “The implementation of this system is set to bring a raft of benefits to patients attending the hospital as health records are available instantly to those caring for a patient. Increased efficiencies mean patients will wait less time for their diagnoses, treatments and care. Over the course of the coming months and years we anticipate this will translate into shorter wait times and hospital stays.” HITN sister publication MobiHealthNews reported last month that the European Investment Bank was backing the implementation of Ireland’s eHealth programme with a €225m loan to support the creation of a “modern patient-centred health service”, according to Health Minister Simon Harris. NHS trust goes live with Patient Administration System East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with an Allscripts Patient Administration System (PAS) in a project that involved the migration of 42 million records to the new system. The trust runs five hospitals and community clinics, providing a range of services to a local population of around 695,000 people. “Deploying a new PAS is a major undertaking, but our old system was outdated and we had to change it to move onto the next stage of our IT development," said Andy Barker, East Kent Hospitals IT Director. "The Allscripts PAS gives us the platform to move forward with an electronic patient record." East Kent Hospitals ran a joint procurement for a new PAS with Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust back in 2015. Both trusts will now be deploying the Allscripts Sunrise EPR. Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells went live with the Allscripts PAS in 2017. Neurology advice line for GPs saves the NHS £100,000 a year An advice line run by the Walton Centre, a specialist hospital trust, in Liverpool, enabling GPs in the north west of England to call neuro consultants for advice, reducing the need for additional appointments, is saving the NHS £100,000 a year. According to NHS England, nearly 40 per cent of 181 calls received in 2017-18 were solved by GPs, saving around £52,000. Karen Kirkham, NHS England National Clinical Advisor for Primary Care, said the NHS would be looking to scale up similar innovations, with a long-term plan expected to be published later this year. “The Walton Centre’s advice line is an example of integrated care in action, connecting GPs with hospital specialists to provide more joined up care for patients. We often find these kind of improvements also make savings that can be reinvested back into the local NHS. “In this case patients also need less time off work because they need fewer appointments and to travel less, which is also good for the environment,” Kirkham added. Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

The multi-year project involved the abrupt departure of a CMIO, at least one delay and new IT leadership.

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) has become the first NHS trust and the first Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) to be revalidated against the new Stage 6 HIMSS Analytics international Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) standards that came into force at the beginning of the year. The changes were designed to reflect progress in the healthcare technology and information space during the past few years, with the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) requirement, for instance, moved from higher to lower stages of the model (PACS is now part of the Stage 1 criteria, as opposed to Stage 5). New standards were also introduced to ensure that cybersecurity and disaster recovery were “fully recognised as important factors in a modern health service”, John Rayner, Regional Director for Europe and Latin America, HIMSS Analytics, told Healthcare IT News. “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 said. Cambridge University Hospitals went live with Epic back in 2014 CUH, which runs Addenbrooke’s Hospital and The Rosie, originally achieved Stage 6 of the EMRAM standards back in 2015, following the creation of its eHospital digital transformation programme. Webinar: Applying Machine Learning to Patient Records to Improve Clinical Recommendations The HITN team visited CUH more than four years after the “big bang” go-live of their Epic EPR,  configured during an 18-month period to incorporate the trust’s clinical workflows and to support local and national guidelines, and found overwhelming support for its digital agenda. Their EPR is now reportedly being used by around 3,400 staff at peak times across all clinical areas, and Luke Bage, Senior Charge Nurse, told HITN that the system “continually seems to improve”.  “The Epic that you see at the beginning of the year is not the same Epic that you see at the end of the year,” said Dr Afzal Chaudhry, Renal Consultant and Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) at the trust. After developing electronic early warning alerts within the EPR, launched in their Emergency Department in 2016 and across all adult inpatient areas at both hospitals in 2017 to ensure that nurses and doctors are notified if a patient’s clinical observations meet sepsis criteria, the trust has seen a 42 per cent reduction in sepsis mortality. In April this year, CUH linked Epic to the Cerner Millennium system used at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, helping clinicians securely access clinical information about a patient held within each other’s EPR to improve quality of care, as figures show that nearly 30 per cent of their patients attend both trusts for treatment. The next month, through a digital primary care portal called EpicCare Link, a similar initiative was launched to help GPs and community nurses securely access clinical information about their patients from within the Epic EPR, currently available at Granta Medical Practices in Cambridgeshire. The Care Everywhere HIE functionality also connects CUH to Epic hospitals around the world and, once University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust go live with Epic next spring, the trust will also be connected to them. CUH wants to become the first trust to reach EMRAM Stage 7 in the UK Meanwhile, CUH signed a £107m seven-year contract with Novosco in June to replace and strengthen its infrastructure to take account of “more mobile working, device integration, and accommodate telemedicine, whilst keeping the system secure, protected, and accessible”, according to Chaudhry. The transition process is underway, and the trust now has an ambition to reach Stage 7 of the EMRAM.  “The main things that we would like to focus on are a robust methodology for quality improvement informed by the use of data, so that we’ve got real data-driven analytics to help us understand where we have the greatest opportunities to improve patient care and to measure the beneficial outcomes of that in a sort of continuous improvement cycle,” Chaudhry said. Commenting on today's announcement, Dr Ewen Cameron, CUH Executive Director of Improvement and Transformation, added: “To validate against the new criteria shows how far we have come over the years since we implemented Epic and since our last HIMSS inspection. Our aim now is to further advance our use of technology to provide even greater benefits to our patients and staff and, as a result of doing this, become the first Stage 7 trust in the UK.” Only two other organisations have previously reached Stage 6 of the EMRAM in the UK, Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and St George's University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

As MHS Genesis moves past Pacific Northwest pilot sites and into the next phase in California, work at the VA "is only beginning."