UCHealth utilizes proposed EHR for value-based care

The University of Colorado Health is the recent recipient of HIMSS Analytics’ coveted Stage 7 award in recognition of the healthcare agency’s execution and utilization of EHRs.

The proposed EHR enables both sufferers and contributors to share a detailed picture of the care being delivered and got across all UCHealth care settings, claims UCHealth’s CIO Steve Hess. Furthermore, the system is capable to leverage growingly advanced functionality, involving population health analytics, infusion pump integration, and online sufferer engagement abilities, like OpenNotes and telemedicine.

Although, UCHealth plans to utilize its information technology platform as a springboard to acquire more sufferer care capabilities.

“We have always searched at implementing EHRs as a means to an end,” states Hess, who is responsible for the management of data systems across the enterprise, involving its Epic EHR network and My Health Connection patient portal. “We are now at a point where we are capable to utilize the foundation to really make few actually dramatic changes in manner we deliver care, like telehealth, clinical decision support, population health, and advanced predictive analytics.”

“We are beginning to utilize the information and the tools to make changes in procedure,” he further adds.

UCHealth has been on its Stage 7 journey since the year of 2011, when the agency 1^st executed its EHR at one of its hospitals, followed by executions of the records system at all of UCHealth’s services. “Overnight, we necessarily tripled in size,” he claims. “Frankly, it is an excellent rate of work that has been done. We knew if we did not integrate the information technology systems, it would be complicated to make economies of scale and get physician groups to collaborate.”

HIMSS Analytics recently declared that UCHealth, which involves 5 hospitals and various clinic sites throughout Colorado, southern Wyoming and western Nebraska, had got the acute care EMRAM Stage 7 Validation, and its 202 outpatient services have been identified with the HIMSS O-EMRAM Stage 7 Outpatient Validation.

In accordance to HIMSS Analytics, merely 4.3% of the more than 5,000 hospitals during the 1^st quarter of the year 2016 got the Stage 7 Validation, and just 8.1% of the more than 37,000 outpatient clinics got the Stage 7 Outpatient Validation.

“We actively attracted this designation. It is not something that merely happens by tragedy,” states Hess. “We searched at HIMSS Analytics as a proxy for the maturity of our informatics and information technology solutions, and how well the agency has adopted the technology that has been executed. Meaningful Use is believed to be 1 measure and HIMSS Analytics is another.”

As an outcome, he believes that UCHealth is well positioned to handle the issues of value-based care as the healthcare industry shifts away from the fee-for-service payment settings.

“There is a ton of heavy lifting to do still,” Hess appreciates, pointing out that “we’ve 1 foot in fee-for-service and 1 foot in the value-based world.”