EHI Intelligence launches CDMI

EHI Intelligence will today publish its inaugural Clinical Digital Maturity Index, with a score and rank for each of the 160 acute NHS trusts in England.

The CDMI has been developed by EHI Intelligence specifically for the NHS over a three-year period. It has been supported by NHS England, which has formed a partnership with EHI’s research arm to make the CDMI freely available to trusts and to develop it further.

At the heart of the CDMI is a nine level model of a hospital’s administrative and clinical systems, populated by data from the EHI Intelligence Database, and a dedicated round of new research.

The CDMI therefore assesses each trust’s installed base of 27 clinical and administrative systems. A report published today assigns a score to this base, enabling a ranking of trusts to be drawn up.

The report find there are wide differences between trusts; the three trusts that lead the ranking – King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – have all the systems in place.

But those at the bottom have only around half of the systems included within the inaugural CDMI, which will be expanded in future years to look at the sophistication and integration of systems, the extent to which they have been rolled out, and their impact on trust efficiency and safety.

“The CDMI establishes, for the first time, reliable national and local benchmarks for the adoption of electronic patient record and related digital healthcare technologies,” said Karl Grundy, EHI’s head of intelligence.

“It will provide a shared knowledge base for acute trusts, their suppliers and commissioners to map their digital journeys, allowing them to share innovation, analyse trends over time and see where their efforts can best be focused.”

In a foreword to the report, Beverley Bryant, NHS England’s director of strategic systems and technology at NHS England, and Jonathan Kay, its chief clinical information officer, say the CDMI should encourage collaboration to identify and make progress.

“We expect the CDMI to inspire organisations to work together – to demonstrate progress and provide peer support, leadership and networks for improvement,” they write.

“This will mean that all trusts will be able to share expertise and track themselves making effective progress to increased digital maturity.”

EHI Intelligence will formally launch the CDMI and discuss the results of the report at 4.45pm today, Tuesday, 5 November, at EHI Live 2013 at the NEC in Birmingham.

The immediate next steps in the development of the model will be a period in which trusts will be invited to examine and validate the data, after which a new ranking will be drawn up. Trusts that want to do this should contact EHI Intelligence for further details.

The Clinical Digital Maturity Index will be launched at 4.45pm today, Tuesday 5 November, at EHI Intelligence’s stand at EHI Live 2013. Please come along to hear more about the index, its inaugural ranking of trusts, and future plans.

EHI Live 2013 is more than a meeting, more than an exhibition. For anyone involved in the use of information in healthcare it’s a golden opportunity to update knowledge, get answers to questions, meet the experts and think about the future. This year’s conference is free for all visitors to attend.