Having attained this stage of digital maturity, NTFGH, which is managed by JurongHealth, is paperless, chartless, scriptless and filmless. Providers which have reached Stage 7, the pinnacle stage, are recognised for having achieved all the steps necessary towards a paperless environment. According to HIMSS Analytics, NTFGH is one of five hospitals in Asia with the certification, and the first EMRAM 7 hospital in Singapore, ASEAN and Australasia.
The inaugural Singapore eHealth Innovations Summit kicked off with Associate Professor Benjamin Ong, Director of Medical Services, Ministry of Health and the event’s Guest of Honour, discussing Singapore’s aim to balance quality and accessibility with sustainability in its healthcare goals for 2020 and beyond.
He said: “One advantage we have in Singapore is that we have an increasingly digitally savvy and enabled population. In addition, a larger percentage of patients and caregivers have the desire to and are taking greater ownership in their own and their loved ones’ health and disease management. This enables us to increasingly leverage technology to deliver smart health, so that care can be more personalised, integrated, proactive, and empowering.”
Presenting the award with Associate Professor Ong, HIMSS President and CEO Stephen Lieber said: “At the highest level of the EMRAM – Stage 7 – the care environment demonstrates a quantum leap from Stage 6 in terms of improvements in quality, safety, performance and profits. With this milestone, Singapore is again illuminating its position as the regional role model in healthcare. Singapore also continues to have the highest number of public hospitals with HIMSS Stage 6 in Asia Pacific. We look forward to more Stage 7 achievements as you journey towards your Smart Nation vision.”
“Technology has the transformative power to help all healthcare professionals make more accurate diagnosis, prescribe, dispense and administer the correct medications as well as be more cost-efficient in doing examinations. For example, a pathologist can now – with the aid of technology – run multiple tests simultaneously on one biopsy sample instead of requiring one sample per test. This also reduces incidents of patients undergoing repeat procedures to retrieve new samples. To successfully transform care, providers must leverage technology for all care teams and departments including diagnostic laboratories and pharmacies, and not only reserve technology for traditional users like doctors and nurses,” said Dr Nipit Piravej, Chair of the HIMSS Asia Pacific Governing Council.
NTFGH achieved HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 in collaboration with Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), the Singapore Health Ministry's IT arm which manages information technology and innovations at all public healthcare institutions.
HIMSS Analytics developed the EMR Adoption Model in 2005 as a methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record (EMR) systems for hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database. There are eight stages (0 to 7) that measure a hospital's implementation and utilization of information technology applications. The final stage, Stage 7, represents an advanced patient record environment. The validation process to confirm a hospital has reached Stage 7 includes a site visit by an executive from HIMSS Analytics and former or current chief information officers to ensure an unbiased evaluation of the Stage 7 environments.
Stage 7 designees can:
- Share patient clinical information via electronic transaction with all entities within the entire health information exchange network
- Support the sharing of widespread and comprehensive use of health and wellness information by consumers and providers
- Use data warehousing and mining techniques to capture and analyse care data to perfect, advance and institute organisation-wide operational, financial and quality improvements
Said Foo Hee Jug, CEO, JurongHealth: "We are fortunate to be able to plan and implement an integrated technology infrastructure and IT systems in our new hospitals right from the start. This allowed us to level up with the other healthcare institutions with HIMSS Stage 6 within two months of opening. Moving on to Stage 7 is indeed a milestone for all of us at JurongHealth as we are literally paper-less, scriptless, chartless and filmless! Our nurses love it when they no longer need to chart manually as almost all our medical equipment are integrated directly to our EMR.
"I am heartened by the collective commitment within the hospital to make this possible. The 97% utilisation of electronic orders, 98% adoption rate of barcoding, low paper footprint, and comprehensive analytics across clinical and operational data have allowed for better integration of data and clinical decision support, improved workflow and processes as well as care delivery. The level of collaboration among the doctors, nurses, pharmacists and ancillary staff is amazing and we will continue to harness the potential of the integration, robust data sharing and analytics to achieve better patient care and outcome."
On the achievement, Dr Chong Yoke Sin, CEO, IHIS, shared: "Obtaining Stage 7 is indeed an achievement for Singapore - for public sector healthcare, and even more so for patients. The pervasive use of technology and four-less* environment implemented at NTFGH demonstrated enhanced patient safety, time savings for healthcare professionals, and shorter hospital stays for patients. Ultimately, this resulted in more time for their healthcare professionals to spend on direct patient care, cost savings for patients, and made hospital resources available for more patients to be treated. We reap multiple benefits through the integration of devices and over 50 systems – it helps to avoid silos of information, enables critical patient data and intelligent analyses to be easily retrieved in a short time, which otherwise wouldn’t be possible if done manually."
John Daniels, Global VP, Healthcare, Advisory Services Group, HIMSS Analytics said: “NTFGH has achieved Stage 7 of the acute care EMRAM in less than two years after opening its doors to patients. It was very clear that the staff at this hospital from the CEO and throughout the organisation, are all in harmony on using information technology to provide the best possible healthcare to the people of Singapore. From significant improvements in reducing the length of hospital stays to generating cost savings for both patients and the hospital, JurongHealth can be proud of this hospital becoming the first Stage 7 hospital in Singapore."
*The term refers to being paper-less, scriptless, chartless and filmless.
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