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Guest Editorial
HIMSS ANALYTICS REVEALS
NEW CONTINUITY OF CARE MATURITY MODEL The Health Information Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) analytics division unveiled a new maturity model for healthcare organisations in February that goes beyond the highest level of its EMR adoption model. For Australian healthcare organisations, the new continuity of care maturity model provides a way to benchmark progress and capabilities in interconnectedness and continuity of care against other organisations on a global scale. LINDSAY KILEY BA, MBA Marketing director, Asia-Pacific, InterSystems lindsay.kiley@intersystems.com
The HIMSS Analytics electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM) has been hugely influential in guiding organisations around the world in their implementation of electronic health records, but EMRAM was never designed to address the sort of national, regional or community-based technology issues that governments and healthcare organisations are grappling with as they share electronic health records. So when the new HIMSS Analytics continuity of care maturity model (CCMM) was unveiled at the HIMSS14 Conference and Exhibition in the US in February, a number of healthcare organisations and technology providers, InterSystems amongst them, voiced their support. With seven stages that build on EMRAM, CCMM is a global model for healthcare providers that focuses on information exchange, care coordination, interoperability, patient engagement and analytics, with the ultimate goal of holistic individual and population health management.
About the author Lindsay Kiley is marketing director for the Asia Pacific region at InterSystems, a provider of software for connected healthcare. She joined the healthcare information technology industry 15 years ago with a passionate belief in the potential for IT to change the way healthcare is delivered.
In a presentation at HIMSS14, the executive vice president of HIMSS Analytics, John Hoyt, detailed the seven stages and associated criteria of the new model and how it can drive transformation in individual and regional health systems globally. “This is the direction the market is headed and we are happy to provide
a tool healthcare delivery organisations and governments can use to gauge their progress towards a more efficient care delivery approach,” Mr Hoyt said.
Seven stages of enlightenment To many in the healthcare industry, the highest level of the new continuity of care maturity model, Stage 7: ‘Knowledgedriven engagement for a dynamic, multi-vendor and multi-organisational interconnected healthcare delivery model’, may seem like nirvana, a seemingly unattainable level of enlightenment. Moving down through the levels, however, the language more recognisably describes what Australian healthcare organisations are working towards. Stage 6: ‘Closed loop care coordination across care team members’, might be used to describe a long-term goal of regional healthcare networks such as the South West Alliance of Rural Health in Victoria. Stage 5: ‘Community-wide patient record using applied information with a patient engagement focus’, on the other hand, sounds like something that the PCEHR may one day deliver. The most advanced healthcare providers in Australia in terms of their healthcare