Asking a healthcare professional how their electronic health record has brought value to their daily routine is a question that may garner more glares and frowns than happy responses.
Provider dissatisfaction with the EHR ecosystem is nothing new, but HIMSS is hoping that its new Value Score will help healthcare organizations understand how to chart a data-driven path towards happier clinicians and better outcomes for patients.
The model, introduced in early December, will bring a dose of quantifiable perspective to providers who may not understand exactly how their health IT infrastructure is making a day-to-day difference, says Blain Newton, Senior VP and Chief Operating Officer at HIMSS Analytics.
The Value Score will also deliver some much-needed guidance to organizations seeking better strategies for turning their investments into meaningful returns.
Building on the international success of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model (EMRAM), the Value Score will gauge how healthcare organizations are leveraging their IT tools for the greater good now that foundational EHR adoption has hit critical mass.
“We need to start helping organizations move beyond adoption,” Newton said to HealthITAnalytics.com. “It’s not enough just to try and implement a piece of IT anymore.”
“Organizations are looking for guidance and help in understanding how to actually optimize and leverage these systems to achieve value. Whether that value is improved clinical outcomes, improved financial returns, or increased patient provider satisfaction and engagement, it really comes down to how you use these tools to maximize your return on the investment.”
The Value Score aims to prepare healthcare organizations for the challenging pay-for-performance landscape ahead of them, said Stephen Lieber, President and CEO of HIMSS, in a press release.
“With the move towards value-based care, the international healthcare community can now look beyond initial adoption and toward a broader, all-encompassing way to measure the clinical and financial value of health IT,” he stated. “The Value Score is a combination of HIMSS’ core competencies and is the natural next step in the continual evolution towards better care and outcomes for patients and providers.”
While the EMRAM scale focuses solely on the number and type of systems that a certain organization has implemented successfully, the Value Score’s four sections judge how those tools are being put to good use. The two scales are technically independent of one another, but it will be hard to achieve high marks on the Value Score’s baseline value element without a strong underlying infrastructure, Newton says.
“If your organization has adopted and implemented IT in a meaningful way – if you are at EMRAM Stage 7, for example – there is an implicit value in having integrated lab systems or a fully paperless environment,” he explained. “Presumably, Stage 7 brings more valuable than Stage 1 or 2, so part of the Value Score is calculated based on higher levels of achievement on the EMRAM model.”
