Trinity Health-New England announced this week that St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center has received a Stage 7 Award from Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Analytics – the highest level on the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model.
St. Francis is the only Trinity Health-New England acute care hospital and the first across the Trinity Health system to have earned Stage 7 status. Fewer than 4.5 percent of U.S. hospitals had attained Stage 7 as of the second quarter, according to a news release from St. Francis.
St. Francis partnered with Epic Systems Corp. in 2012 to implement a single, streamlined electronic medical record system that integrates patient records, scheduling, billing, pharmacy, radiology and other ancillary systems in one information technology platform, including connecting primary care providers and specialists outside of the hospital to the EMR.
The hospital will spend about $120 million for software, hardware, support and personnel to implement and support the EMR over 10 years, it said.
To achieve Stage 7, St. Francis had to demonstrate that it no longer uses paper charts to deliver and manage patient care and has a mixture of discrete data, document images, and medical images within its EMR; uses data warehousing to analyze patterns of clinical data to improve quality of care and patient safety and care delivery efficiency; easily shares clinical information via standardized electronic transactions with all entities that are authorized to treat the patient, or a health information exchange such as other non-associated hospitals, ambulatory clinics, sub-acute environments, employers, payers and patients in a data sharing environment; and demonstrates data continuity for all hospital services, including inpatient, outpatient, emergency department and with any owned or managed ambulatory clinics.
