Southern DHB in New Zealand commences digital maturity assessments
Southern District Health Board (DHB) in New Zealand has kicked off its Digital Health Maturity Models project with the Ministry of Health.
Southern and Mid Central DHBs were chosen by the Ministry last year to pilot three HIMSS Analytics maturity assessments: the electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM), outpatient EMRAM (O-EMRAM) and the continuity-of-care maturity model (CCMM).
Southern DHB business solutions manager Jack Devereux says the CCMM assessment project started in late February and involves filling out questionnaires based on five care settings: acute, secondary, primary, home support and residential care.
For each of these settings there are three stakeholder groups – governance, clinical and information technology. Each of these has 250 questions to answer and around three weeks to respond.
The HIMSS website says CCMM focuses on the capabilities needed in order to “seamlessly coordinate patient care across a continuum of care sites and providers”.
On March 27, a training workshop with HIMSS, the Ministry, Mid-Central staff and DHB representatives from each region will introduce the assessments nationally.
The following training days are an opportunity for the CCMM surveys to be reviewed and discussed with the Southern DHB stakeholder groups.
Preliminary findings from all three assessments will be presented back on day four of the workshop.
“That’s just a starting point, as the idea around the training is to identify people who can assess progress on an ongoing basis as we look to implement some of the actions identified,” Devereux says.
HIMSS EMRAM scores hospitals internationally on their adoption and use of electronic medical records on a scale from 0–7, and O-EMRAM is used to evaluate services provided outside of a hospital or acute care environment.
Devereux says the EMRAM and O-EMRAM surveys will be completed predominantly by the information services team, with pharmacy and clinical directors potentially being involved.
He says the DHB is focused on implementing electronic health records as part of its digital transformation strategy.
“We want to use this opportunity to inform our actions over the next few years as we head towards a new digital hospital being built here,” says Devereux.
Mid-Central DHB will be next to assess its digital maturity.
Ministry of Health group manager digital strategy and investment Darren Douglass said last year that the success of the pilot programmes will inform whether the assessments are rolled out nationally.
This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.
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