Washington, D.C.-based Children’s National Health System on Wednesday won a HIMSS Davies Award for its pediatric concussion care initiatives. 

“This recognition represents over 10 years of hard work from hundreds of staff here at Children’s National,” said Brian Jacobs, MD, who serves as CIO and CMIO at Children’s National. Jacobs added that the wide-ranging initiative included people, processes and technological innovations alongside research and education, both in-house and among children and their families. 

[Also: Stanford Children's Health, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford win Davies awards]

The HIMSS Davies program honors hospitals and systems that put health IT, including electronic health records of course, to improve care outcomes. 

To earn the award, Children’s National Health System demonstrated innovative use of real-time quality and patient safety data for both clinicians and pediatric patients’ families. The hospital incorporated CT scan decision support rules into its EHR, for instance, which slashed CT scans by 44 percent and cut costs more than $875,000. 

Additionally, by transitioning from the more traditional approach of clinicians dictating notes that then go through a time-consuming transcription into voice recognition technology for notes in specialty clinics, Children’s National was able to not only make those notes immediately available to all doctors on a patient’s care team but also eliminate a lot of the expense of transcribing them in the first place. 

Jonathan French, director, Davies Award of Excellence Program at HIMSS, said that Children’s National earned the award by demonstrating “excellence through efforts to increase patient engagement and improve patient outcomes, through their health IT optimization for pediatric concussion care, in addition to various other care initiatives.”

HIMSS will recognize Children’s National Health System at the HIMSS18 Awards Gala at Wynn Hotel Las Vegas on Thursday, March 8, 2018. Tickets are available through the conference registration form.

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com