HIMSS Analytics has awarded Cleveland Clinic Health System with its Stage 7 Ambulatory Award, lauding the health system's outpatient settings for using patient-generated data to improve outcomes, and for lowering costs by avoiding unnecessary tests.

[See also: HIMSS Analytics launches EMRAM for ambulatory practices]

The award represents Cleveland Clinics' attainment of the highest level on the Ambulatory Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model, which offers a framework for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record systems for ambulatory facilities owned by hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database.

During the third quarter of 2014, just 4.37 percent of more than 27,000 U.S. ambulatory clinics in the database received the Stage 7 Ambulatory Award.

[See also: Cleveland Clinic opens EMR to patients]

"The Cleveland Clinic Health System has figured out how to securely file patient-entered data in a discrete form to track and improve patient outcomes, and they have integrated a family history questionnaire into the physician's workflow that automatically calculates and presents to the physician the best personalized plan for that patient," said John Daniels, vice president, strategic relations at HIMSS, in a press statement. "They also demonstrated significant savings from hard-stop alerts for high-cost / low-value tests. The Cleveland Clinic lives up to its reputation as a world-class healthcare delivery organization."

In a statement, C. Martin Harris, MD, Cleveland Clinic's chief information officer, said the award represented validation for the health system's clincians and IT professionals and their commitment to a "model that effectively utilizes all the tools of the 21st century to deliver care of uncompromising quality to every patient, every day."

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