Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WUTH) has been named among the ‘Most Wired’ hospitals for 2018, in a ranking published by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). The programme recognises hospitals and health systems positioned at the forefront of digital care for improving outcomes, supporting population health management initiatives, and effectively using technology to deliver the highest possible quality of care for their patients.

In 2017, WUTH was recognised as a Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) by NHS England for being one of the most digitally enabled hospitals in the country. WUTH’s programme to deliver their GDE goals – known as Digital Wirral – aims to harness innovative technology available for the industry to transform the way health and social care services are planned and delivered in the region.

WUTH has worked hard over the past years to implement a wide portfolio of Cerner solutions across the Trust and maximise the functionality of their electronic health record (EHR), powered by Cerner Millennium®. These improvements have been the basis for many local developments to support infection control, safeguarding, document retrieval, and electronic referrals. The resulting state-of-the-art integrated record provides clinicians with sophisticated decision support that helps minimise medical errors and improve outcomes. It also means improved experiences for patients and clinicians, shorter inpatient stays, and the Trust getting more value from precious resources, such as diagnostics tests.

Additionally, WUTH has implemented their Patient Portal which is being used by individuals being treated for colorectal, urological or breast cancer to reduce the number of follow-up outpatient appointment they need after completing their cancer treatment.

The announcement of WUTH ranking amongst the Most Wired hospitals in the world comes only a few months after the Trust celebrated their first anniversary as a GDE site, and with that, some of the achievements and progress they’ve made over the past 12 months.

One of WUTH’s recent accomplishments is the implementation of the Wirral Care Record (WCR). As part of the system-wide Healthy Wirral partnership – a ground-breaking population health approach that uses Cerner’s intelligence platform, HealtheIntent^® – WUTH and their partners have developed a single longitudinal record covering nearly 330,000 citizens living across the region. The programme is also underpinned by Cerner’s Health Information Exchange (HIE) technology to connect information and safely share it with health and social care providers involved in the patient journey.

The WCR is helping care providers and commissioners in Wirral to know their population and identify risks, and apply clinical recommendations to these citizens to help engage them and keep them healthy and out of care.

The 2018 HealthCare’s Most Wired survey, now in its 20th year, was designed to track adoption of healthcare IT in hospitals and highlight strengths and gaps in the industry, with the goal of identifying best practices and promoting the strategic use of available technologies to elevate the health and care of communities around the world. Staff engagement and satisfaction has proven key in the success WUTH’s transformation journey so far – the Trust has run pre- and post-implementation surveys as part of their strategy to measure adoption and has seen positive results and feedback from hospital staff related to the WCR and the introduction of HIE.

This year, CHIME received applications from more than 600 organisations representing 2,190 hospitals from nine countries. The results, announced on 2 November at the CHIME Fall CIO Forum in San Diego, California, recognised 254 healthcare organisations that were successful in their applications, with only six of them being non-US.

About Cerner

At Cerner, we believe in building positive, long-term partnerships that drive value across the health and care landscape. Our intelligent platforms and services connect people, information and care at 27,500+ facilities of all sizes worldwide and help manage the health of 110 million citizens across the globe.

Together with clients and industry partners, we’re innovating for the future, integrating entire health and care systems to enable them to deliver smarter, value-based care, better outcomes, and proactively manage and improve the wellbeing of their populations.

In the UK, our powerful, open and interoperable Millennium^® EHR platform is utilised at 22 NHS Trusts, our Health Information Exchange (HIE) is connecting over seven million UK records, while our population health intelligence platform, HealtheIntent^®, is contracted to help clients proactively manage and improve the health of 9.5 million UK citizens.

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