DALLAS, March 25, 2014 — Children’s Medical Center, the seventh-largest pediatric health care provider in the nation, and the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) hosted the Health Information Technology Stakeholder Summit and tour on March 6. About 40 health IT stakeholders from across the country attended the day-long event to see first-hand Children’s advanced use of technology across its continuum of care and to gain a more thorough understanding of how incorporating health IT into healthcare can improve processes, drive efficiency, lower costs and deliver better patient care.
Children’s is a recognized leader in health IT and is committed to improving service delivery by investing in health IT and committing to superior informatics, including data rich dashboards and smooth adoption of technology by clinicians. Children’s was one of the earliest adopters of technology, with implementations of pharmacy, lab systems and electronic order entry in the early ‘90’s along with nurse documentation in the mid-‘90s. It was among the first organizations in the nation to implement bar code medication administration (BCMA) as a medication safety measure in 2001 and is now on its third generation of BCMA vendors. Children’s was also an early participant in the Health Information Exchange.
In 2013, Children’s was named an Enterprise HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence winner. Additional accomplishments include becoming a Health Information Trust (HITRUST) Common Security Framework-certified organization, participating with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in the “Ignite!” personal health record pilot program, and launching the state’s first dedicated neonatal telemedicine program, Children’s Medical Center TeleNICU.