HIMSS Honors Kaiser Permanente for Electronic Health Record Implementation

Prestigious Davies Award Presented for Organizational Excellence

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Sep 13, 2011, 04:50 ET

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Health Information Management Systems Society announced today that Kaiser Permanente is the 2011 recipient of the coveted and highly respected annual HIMSS Organizational Davies Award. The award recognizes excellence in the implementation and value derived from health information technology. Kaiser Permanente has one of the most extensive non-governmental electronic health record systems in the world and leads private health care systems in e-connectivity.

HIMSS is the largest and most prestigious health IT industry organization in the world, with more than 38,000 member organizations.

"We're honored to receive the HIMSS Davies Award for organizational excellence in health care IT," said Philip Fasano, chief information officer and executive vice president, Kaiser Permanente. "Every one of our nearly 9 million members today has an electronic health record because of the tremendous talent and vision of our leadership, technologists and clinicians. Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® allows us to offer our members the highest quality, most affordable and most efficient health care anywhere."

In addition to the Davies Award, HIMSS also gives awards to hospitals for IT excellence by rating progress for connectivity using eight stages (0-7), with Stage 7 being the pinnacle of an environment in which paper charts are no longer used to deliver patient care. To date, HIMSS has awarded the Stage 7 honor to 60 hospitals, 35 of which are Kaiser Permanente hospitals, making it the organization with more awards than any other health care provider.

"We are committed to improving patient care by translating data and information into better knowledge for our physicians and members. Done right, Health IT can strengthen the physician-patient relationship," said Jack Cochran, MD, executive director, The Permanente Federation. "KP HealthConnect places real-time, critical health data at physicians' fingertips so they can provide the best possible care to our members."

Kaiser Permanente participates in a number of programs with health care leaders to demonstrate the potential of health IT when data is shared among providers. Kaiser Permanente successfully shares data with the Veterans' Administration in San Diego, Calif., and Hampton Roads, Va., and is expanding that work to include the U.S. Department of Defense. It is also a founding member of the Care Connectivity Consortium, which brings together both the latest technology and a shared mission among five provider organizations to deliver patient-centered care to patients, utilizing standards-based health IT to share data about patients electronically.

Kaiser Permanente pioneered the development of systems that modeled data from multiple electronic inputs into a repository using common terminology created from a wide array of original source systems.

Last year, Kaiser Permanente donated that Convergent Medical Terminology at no cost to the international health care community so that all providers who use electronic data could benefit from the translation-enabling technology. The donation made the results of years of work at Kaiser Permanente available to help U.S. health professionals and hospitals achieve key meaningful use standards set forth by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Kaiser Permanente is also a trailblazer in patient engagement. The organization's personal health record, My Health Manager, is being used by more than 3.6 million members to engage their care teams and become actively involved in their health care. My Health Manager provides secure health information management features, including online appointment scheduling and prescription refills, lab test results, eligibility and benefits information, and even children's immunization records. In 2010 alone, Kaiser Permanente members viewed more than 25.8 million test results and sent nearly 10.7 million emails to their physicians using My Health Manager.

Last year, Kaiser Permanente released Connected for Health: Using Electronic Health Records to Transform Care Delivery, a book to share lessons learned along the path toward health IT implementation and showcase some of the ways Kaiser Permanente is using its comprehensive electronic records system. You can learn more about how patients, clinicians and researchers are using My Health Manager and KP HealthConnect by checking out Kaiser Permanente's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/kaiserpermanenteorg.

More than two thirds of HIMSS's member organizations work in health care provider, governmental and not-for-profit organizations. HIMSS also includes more than 540 corporate members and more than 120 not-for-profit organizations that share Kaiser Permanente's mission of transforming health care through the effective use of information technology and management systems.

Created in 1994, the HIMSS Davies Award honors the legacy of Nicholas E. Davies, MD, an Atlanta-based practicing physician who was president-elect of the American College of Physicians and a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Improving the Patient Record. An advocate for electronic health records who was ahead of his time, Dr. Davies died in 1991 in a plane crash. For more information on the Davies Award, please visit http://www.himss.org/davies.

About Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is committed to helping shape the future of health care. We are recognized as one of America's leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Founded in 1945, our mission is to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We currently serve 8.8 million members in nine states and the District of Columbia. Care for members and patients is focused on their total health and guided by their personal physicians, specialists and team of caregivers. Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management. Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to care innovations, clinical research, health education and the support of community health. For more information, go to: www.kp.org/newscenter.

For information, contact:

Randi Kahn, GolinHarris for Kaiser Permanente 703-522-0280, [email protected]
Ravi Poorsina, Kaiser Permanente 510-421-0557, [email protected]

SOURCE Kaiser Permanente