Stage 6 Recognition Adds to Valley Hospital's Growing List of Quality Care Accomplishments
(2/15/2011)

The Valley Hospital, a 451-bed health care facility in Ridgewood, NJ, has long made quality care look easy. A frequent recipient of J.D. Power and Associates Distinguished Hospital award, as well as a regular on Leapfrog Group's Top Hospitals List, Valley Hospital (and its parent organization, Valley Health System) can add yet another achievement to its repertoire: Stage 6 EMR adoption status from HIMSS Analytics.

"Our goal all along has been to share real-time information across all departments, and an EMR is a crucial part of making that happen," says Eric Carey, CIO for Valley. "Although HIMSS certainly gave us a good benchmark to measure ourselves against, we've always been working toward a high level of EMR adoption."

Signing with MEDITECH in late 1994, the board of executives and I.S. team at Valley Hospital got started right away implementing the core applications of the MEDITECH system. "Our board wanted to centralize all departments across the facility through one integrated HCIS, and we were able to do that quickly with MEDITECH," says Carey.

Furthermore, Valley Hospital's executives wanted Advanced Clinical applications and an EMR to give clinicians more functionality and an easy-to-use source for viewing patient information from across the care continuum. With the board's support, they became early adopters of Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE), and have continued to act as pioneers with their use of HIT and Advanced Clinical applications to improve care quality and patient safety.

"When we initially applied to HIMSS Analytics to inquire about our EMR Adoption Model Score, we were already at Stage 5, and very close to Stage 6 status," says Carey. "We only needed to utilize Physician Documentation and templates to qualify for Stage 6."

The Valley Hospital has been recognized by many other quality monitoring organizations in recent years. In 2006, 2007, and 2009, they were named to the Leapfrog Group's Top Hospitals List for quality and safety. They are also regularly included on the Hospitals & Health Networks' (H&HN) Most Wired List. In addition, Valley Hospital is the only health care organization to receive the J.D. Power and Associates Distinguished Hospital award for eight consecutive years. This distinction acknowledges the Valley Hospital for exhibiting operational excellence while simultaneously creating a unique caring, healing environment for patients.

"We are a very well-rounded hospital, with a strong commitment to delivering exceptional patient care—while also pursuing technology to improve our operational efficiency," says Maureen Curran Kleinman, coordinator of communications and marketing at Valley Hospital. "We have been very fortunate to receive industry recognition for these efforts, but awards are not our motivation. We just plan to keep doing what we're doing for the sake of our patients."

The Valley Hospital's next goal is to become completely paperless, which will help them to achieve Stage 7 status from HIMSS Analytics. "We are confident that MEDITECH's functionality will get us to Stage 7," says Carey. "Our partnership with MEDITECH has helped us get to where we are today, and we know they will help us to reach our future goals as well."

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