HIMSS 7 designation advances UNMC’s mission

Last week, representatives from the top medical school in Australia, Royal Melbourne Hospital, came to UNMC/Nebraska Medicine — to see our electronic medical records system.

Their interest was piqued by the Health Information and Management System Society (HIMSS) Analytics awarding Nebraska Medicine-Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine-Bellevue the highest certification for electronic medical record adoption model, Stage 7 certification.

Michael Ash, M.D., chief transformation officer for Nebraska Medicine and an assistant professor of internal medicine at UNMC, said the designation, awarded in December, also positively impacts UNMC’s missions of education, research and clinical care.

The HIMSS 7 impact can be seen in many ways:

Patients
According to Dr. Ash, the information which is entered into the system allows UNMC to create what’s called a learning health system, “where we can use data to better understand the care we provide and how decisions impact our patients,” he said. “So it gives us an opportunity to look retrospectively and we can apply that learning more prospectively. We are working with experts at the UNMC College of Public Health on predictive analytics algorithms in areas like sepsis detection. It is absolutely our intent to save lives through earlier detection of sepsis. The EMR will make that possible.”

Students/Faculty
The HIMSS 7 designation allows for a couple of different educational venues for faculty and students, Dr. Ash said. “We have specific configurations of the system that have fake ‘patients’ that will allow students to do case-based learning in the EMR,” he said. “These simulated cases help demonstrate progression of a disease and better prepare students for their clinical rotations.”

“For example when medical students are on clinical rotations, they can use the EMR to quickly review the progression of that patient’s care. They can review the documentation, flow sheets and test at their own pace. When I was a medical student you often struggled to get access to the paper chart. It wasn’t uncommon to have to wait for a time when it wasn’t being used and then being tethered to one spot. Today students can more efficiently access that same information from their mobile phones. We also allow students to pend orders for signature, preparing them for placing orders on their own in the future.”

Reseachers
From a researcher’s perspective, the more digitized the data, the better, Dr. Ash said. “Digitalization of data gives us a better understanding of our patients,” he said. “We are able to pull information, de-identify it and make it available for researchers across the organization. So they can look at dozens, or even hundreds, maybe even thousands of patients with a given condition where the names have been de-identified. Looking at that aggregate of large sets of patients with diabetes or heart failure is something that would be very difficult, if not impossible, in a paper-chart world.”