Midlands Partnership NHS FT

Summary

Midlands Partnership Foundation Trust, a diverse community and mental health trust with around 8,500 members of staff and a patient population of around 1.5 million, engaged Ideal to carry out HIMSS assessments for EMR, analytics and infrastructure.

The trust was keen to establish a capability baseline in order to evaluate their progress against planned projects and to support decision making and prioritisation.

Background

Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust provides physical and mental health care, learning disability and adult social care services across Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin. In addition, services are provided on a wider regional and national basis including perinatal, eating disorder and forensic services as well as out of area sexual health services, psychological and drug & alcohol services, in the community and in prisons.

To support a refreshed Digital Strategy for the Trust, the Digital Committee deemed it important to be able to have an impartial baseline to measure progress and the success of the workstreams within the Digital Strategy. The outputs from these baseline assessments would also serve to verify planned activities and validate the prioritisation placed upon them. After assessing the available options, HIMSS Analytics digital maturity models were deemed as the only organisation with a globally recognised set of capability and competency assessments suitable to support the Trust’s requirements. As the most active HIMSS certified organisation in the UK, Ideal Health Consultants were selected to perform HIMSS assessments and generate gap analyses for a number of digital maturity models for MPFT.

Approach

Since the Trust is a mental and community Trust, the HIMSS EMRAM (EMR Adoption Model) assessment was deemed inappropriate to use as it is strongly focussed on acute physical care. To provide the broad range of baselines that were aligned to the workstreams in the digital strategy, O-EMRAM (Outpatient focussed), AMAM (Analytics) and INFRAM (Infrastructure) maturity models and assessment were selected to be used.

Due to the unique nature of the Trusts services and how digital health systems, data and infrastructure is used, Ideal worked directly with HIMSS to first clarify areas of the assessments and how specific principles of the maturity models that should be applied in order for MPFT to gain the greatest insight and benefit from the assessment process and outputs.

The primary guiding approach that focussed attention most usefully was that, “…one would look for all of the functionality… in that system or in systems connected in a way that they appear as one.”

When it comes to the analytics (AMAM – Analytics Maturity and Adoption Model) and infrastructure assessments (INFRAM – Infrastructure Adoption Model), there are no real care setting specific constraints.

Participation from the Trust was focussed and appropriate involving stakeholder workshops and interviews with the service leads and also involvement of the local health informatics service (hosted by the CSU). Both the CCIO and CNIO were engaged as well as relevant ICT leads. The project was delivered on a phased approach with phase completion the trigger for progression. More support was required around the O-EMRAM assessment than analytics and infrastructure as there are some region-specific terminologies in use as well as principles that need to be applied in order that repeat assessments follow the same rules.

Outcome and Benefits

In addition to delivering scorings and gap reports from the HIMSS process, Ideal delivered a more detailed report indicating potential approaches and strategies that were aligned to the care setting and NHS priorities as well as linking results and trends across assessment domains. The Trust scored strongly around their infrastructure assessment with a very strong level five achievement with good progress against levels 6 & 7.

Although scoring at a lower levels in both O-EMRAM and AMAM assessments, the story behind the numbers told a promising story. From an analytics perspective, there was already strong progress underway in closing gaps and would likely achieve higher scores in a very short period of time. This indicated maturity beyond the pure score with reasonably straightforward elevation in scoring achievable, particularly with a planned rearchitecting of the analytics environment.

For EPR, there was strong score and associated stage achievement but a low achievement in a couple of key areas which prevented a higher level achievement; this gave a very strong indication that an uplift in the provision of clinical documentation and results to include structured content, making it more useful and usable both for end users and for analytics, was required to complete the next stage requirements for O EMRAM. Increased and improved integration was also seen to be required.

On reviewing outputs with the Trust, there was a strong alignment between gap findings and already planned projects and how these were aligned and prioritised in the new Digital Strategy. Equally, prioritisation of integration and improvement projects was possible with the structure offered by the maturity models.

The Trust is planning on a repeat set of assessments in 18-24 months.