Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare on March 14 became the first organization in the world to achieve triple stage 7 under the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's new requirements.
HIMSS is a nonprofit organization that grades healthcare organizations on how they use EMR data to improve patient outcomes. In January, HIMSS updated its flagship maturity model for EMR adoption to "reflect the priorities of today’s health systems toward measuring clinical outcomes, patient engagement and use of digital technologies and EMRs to support excellence in patient care."
The updated model employs a more outcome-driven approach to measurement and strategy, according to HIMSS. Its scoring range still runs from stage 0 to 7.
"These ratings are a good way to take a look under the hood to make sure everything is running as well as we think it is," Farukh Usmani, MD, Intermountain's medical director of care transformation, said in a news release. "We don't avoid our annual physical just because we feel good; sometimes it's beneficial to get a good exam done, to be reviewed by an outside source. The HIMSS validation is a good EMR utilization check from the leader in the industry."