Cerner and our partners are committed to clinical excellence and improving the health and wellbeing of children and their families around the world. Our services and solutions are designed to meet the challenges inherent in children’s care at present and into the future. We seek to work closely with our clients to enable innovations that drive continuous improvements that deliver on the Quadruple Aim - better experiences for patients and clinicians, reduced costs, and better health.
Partnering with Cerner helps leading organisations to ensure patient safety, promote quality paediatric-focused care, involve children and young people in their treatment, and allow families to focus on their children, rather than being responsible for their paper records too.
From allergies to weight-based medication dosing, accurate information at the point of care is imperative in safeguarding young patients and enabling accurate care decisions on their treatment. We recognise the necessity of healthcare information technology that supports each child’s specific needs and helps clinicians to manage their care safely and efficiently.
However, Cerner offers more than just systems and solutions. We’re your partner, and our clients are your partners too – together, we make real difference to children worldwide. We push for positive relationships with our clients, some with which we have even built institutes to drive world-class standards in paediatric care and enable the sharing of best practice, clinical workflow design, decision support tools and intelligence with other leading health systems worldwide.
With Cerner, you join a community of like-minded organisations – all focused on the same thing: making care smarter, improving young people’s outcomes and helping them to stay healthy and get the best start to life.
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In the acute setting, our scalable and flexible electronic health record (EHR), Cerner Millennium®, leads the industry in terms of functionality, interoperability and clinical depth. While you can localise content if required, it comes pre-populated with an array of pre-built paediatric-specific content, which has been carefully developed and rigorously tested by our industry-leading paediatric clients and clinical experts worldwide – helping you to deliver your vision faster and reduce the need for costly extensive customisation.
As standard, we include numerous paediatric-specific documents, charts, assessments, interdisciplinary care plans, order sets, forms, rules, workflows, early warning systems, reports, sepsis algorithms and more. The content also has the ability to evolve to ensure that our partners remain at the forefront of care for children and young people.
A partnership with Cerner enables paediatric care providers to access shared content, learning and innovations with the global paediatric care community, helping to drive innovation and provide smarter care across the board.
User satisfaction across the care team is essential to adoption and successful transformation. In an annual survey of 7,400 nurses by Black Book Research[i] looking at inpatient EHR systems from a nursing functionality and usability perspective, Cerner has ranked top for nurse satisfaction for the past three years, and in 2018, Millennium was named as the EHR with the highest rating amongst nurses within children’s hospitals[ii].
We’re focused on facilitating and fostering relationships between health systems around the world. Together, we are all stronger and will go further. Working with an existing Cerner client is a method chosen by Al Jalila Children’s Specialty Hospital in the United Arab Emirates, which has entered into an agreement with the US-based Children’s National Health System to form a strategic health IT partnership.
By collaborating with Children’s National, Al Jalila is aiming to achieve a robust system with advanced and evidence-based paediatric clinical pathways, allowing the country’s only children’s hospital to provide a high level of medical care to young people in the UAE and the region.
The partnership was formed as an extension of The Bear Institute for Health Innovation, which is a collaboration between Children’s National and Cerner. The multi-year agreement seeks to advance paediatric care delivery, foster clinical innovations and enable cutting-edge research, benefitting children across the world.
The Bear Institute collaboration has certainly paid dividends for Children’s National, as it helped them to earn the HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award in 2017. The prestigious honour was handed out in recognition of the organisation reducing the number of CT scans given to patients, improving safety in PICU, and both speeding up and reducing the costs associated with doctors’ notes being available for use by other clinicians.
Ireland’s eHealth strategy has focused on providing excellent clinical care and supported decision making in the care of expectant and new mothers, together with their new born babies, with their award-winning national Maternal and Newborn Clinical Management System (MN-CMS). Recognised as Public Sector Technology Project of the Year in 2018,[iii] MN-CMS provides a full EHR for neonates that can be accessed by paediatricians and all care providers. Partnership with the local neonatology community has delivered clinical innovation in the areas of feeding and medication administration. It has also led to significant safety and workload improvements: partnership with Cerner has enabled nurses to reduce transcription time for nurses by 98 percent – giving each nurse an extra 74 minutes back to care for their young patients in NICU every shift.
Brendan Murphy, clinical lead for neonatology and clinical risk manager for MN-CMS, sees a positive future ahead: “Not only does our MN-CMS EHR help us provide safer, better care for our newborn patients today, it also provides the foundation upon which growth, development and digital health records of our children will be built, making key baseline information and insight available across our healthcare system for this and future generations of children in Ireland.”
While robust and effective paediatric clinical workflows are essential, there is real benefit to connecting information and embedding it into workflow and clinical decision making for the care of young people, and supporting the engagement with themselves, or their parents, guardian or family as required. As part of the Digital Wirral programme, information between local health and care providers is being shared and made visible from within different EHRs. At a single click, clinicians have instant access to a wide range of information, including history, diagnoses, problems, procedures, vital signs, lab results, radiology imaging, visits, past attendances, future appointments, visits and did not attend (DNAs), discharge summaries, allergies, medications and prescriptions, anatomic/cellular pathology and microbiology results.[iv]
By doing so, health information exchange (HIE) is saving time and money across Wirral’s economy - helping them provide a positive care experience, underpinned by safer, more informed and timely decision making.
David Lacy, paediatrician at Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, finds digital and connected care positive for his young patients and their families. “We do work very much as a multi-disciplinary team, so I think that may be why in pediatrics, [sharing information] is more important. We really think that this is a big step forward for paediatrics. The HIE project is really opening up, not just with GPs and primary care, but now with the community, with school nurses, with health visitors, but more importantly perhaps with social services… to keep these children safe.”
Children’s National and the Irish Health Service Executive aren’t our only partners to earn plaudits recently – last year, Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt became the first integrated digital hospital in Africa to achieve HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6.
Gaining the international benchmark classification came a decade into the Cairo-based hospital’s association with Cerner and highlights the collaborative strides that have been made together. Barcoded medication administration, computerised order entries and the ability to collect rich data for use in research have supported Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt improve safety, efficiency, and their ability to positively impact on cure rates.
And in America, we are exceedingly proud to be partners with a paediatrics-focused HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 organisation, Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), which emphasises how we help our clients strive for the very pinnacle of healthcare. Following the Stage 7 award in 2015, CHOC also picked up the 2016 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award.
On their way to earning recognition from HIMSS, CHOC’s benchmark projects included reducing harm from catheter-associated urinary tract infections; centralising human milk management and introducing barcoding; adding embedded care guidelines within Cerner Millennium; and implementing an early alert system for at-risk patients.
These steps and achievements are not being kept locally, though – through international relationships, they are being mirrored by organisation around the globe, spreading the benefits to young people worldwide.
The CHOC team’s focus isn’t solely on making ill patients better – they’re also dedicated to keeping healthy children well through population health management.
CHOC is leveraging data to advance the health of its population by using Cerner’s HealtheIntent® platform, which allows organisations to normalise data from multiple sources, aggregate it and apply intelligence to predict risk, apply clinical recommendations and take action to benefit individuals and communities.
The medium is constantly evolving – while CHOC is currently able to cut readmissions due to asthma, it’s building an alert function that utilises remote monitoring device data and environmental data to work out when poor air quality is likely. Clinicians can then reach out through a patient portal or push notifications to a mobile that can alert people with asthma to the changing conditions, helping them to act accordingly.
In a recent interview, Dr William Feaster, CMIO at CHOC, shared some of the industry-leading work they are undertaking with big data intelligence and Cerner.[v]
“We're going to be feeding analytic data back to the patient, saying 'There's a lot of pollution today - your child is sensitive to pollution, so take a peak flow test this morning [to indicate if their airways have narrowed]'.
“They could get an alert on their smartphone – and message through Cerner’s HealtheLifeSM portal... Ideally, they should see that in conjunction with their asthma action plan. It will give them instructions on what to do.”
While the US is a mature market for population health management, it has gained a foothold much closer to home too, with the UK’s Healthy Wirral initiative creating its own registries for childhood asthma – and other conditions – in order to level the playing field for a contrasting population with significant health inequality. Many others are following suit, including Lewisham Health and Care Partners, North London STP, NHS England, and several GDEs, including Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
We believe that information should flow freely yet securely across a person’s healthcare journey. We have worked with Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, among others, and committed to integrating the national Child Protection – Information Sharing (CP-IS) programme into the EHR. This connects safeguarding information across the health and social care system, helps reduce risk, and aids proactive and reactive safeguarding decision making to improve wellbeing and save professionals’ time.
Cerner, along with our global partners, is dedicated to helping our clients safeguard young people and move their paediatric offerings towards smarter care.
In 1995, Cerner founded the First Hand Foundation to directly fund health-related needs for individual children when financial resources have been exhausted. Serving as the primary philanthropic organisation supported by Cerner and its associates, company funding (as well as investment income) covers all administrative costs of the foundation. This allows 100 percent of donations from associates and donors to directly impact the health of a child.
To date, First Hand has impacted more than 200,000 lives in 83 different countries. More than $21 million has been distributed since First Hand’s inception, paying for clinical necessities (medicines, surgery, etc), medical equipment (hearing aids, wheelchairs, etc), vehicle modifications (lifts, ramps, etc), and travel expenses relating to a child’s care (airfare, lodging, etc).
[i] https://blackbookmarketresearch.newswire.com/news/nursing-ehr-satisfaction-takes-a-major-swing-to-the-positive-black-20473512
[ii] https://blackbookmarketresearch.com/hospital-clinical-care-and-inpatient-ehr
[iii] http://techawards.techcentral.ie/winners-2018/
[iv] Note: as of March 2019, HIE is connecting multiple acute Trusts, over 50 primary care practices, community care, specialist cancer services and the hospice. Social care and mental health are next to connect via Cerner HIE.
[v] https://www.cerner.com/gb/en/pages/healthedatalab-improving-population-health-with-a-secure-next-generation-research-tool