Assessing Digital Capacity with Tools and Benchmarks

Understanding how your organization stacks up when it comes to digital capacity and transformation efforts can feel daunting. In an evolving space, it’s hard to know where to focus, invest, and prioritize while still trying to prove that your initiatives have value.

Healthcare leaders are continuously looking to evaluate not only how they’re performing but also how they’re doing relative to their peers. It can be helpful to use defined benchmarks to measure how stakeholders across your provider organization are driving better health outcomes and using digital technologies in conjunction with your operating models.

Industry Tools & Benchmarks

There are multiple ways to use recognized industry tools and benchmarks to help you successfully explore your organization’s digital capacity and maturity. When used in combination with strategic planning and portfolio development, these can help set you on the right course towards digital maturity.

Overviewed below, explore what these look at and how you can most effectively leverage their output:

HIMSS Digital Health Indicator (DHI)

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is one of the industry’s most trusted organizations for digital benchmarking. To measure your progress in building digital capacity, the DHI explores key dimensions – Governance & Workforce, Predictive Analytics, Interoperability, and Person-Enabled Health – toward building a comprehensive digital ecosystem. This tool can be used in a variety of settings and organizational structures, not just acute care facilities.

Outputs of the DHI can help your organization better prioritize initiatives in the digital portfolio and identify related HIMSS maturity models suited to your goals of ensuring operational and care delivery processes are outcomes-driven and informed by data and real-world evidence to achieve exceptional quality, safety, and sustainable performance.

HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM)

HIMSS’ flagship maturity model provides a framework that measures clinical outcomes, patient engagement, and clinician use of EMR technology for acute care hospitals and affiliated ambulatory settings. It provides a methodology for optimizing digital work environments, improving performance and financial sustainability, building a sustainable workforce, supporting patient experiences, and health outcomes across patient populations.

Using the HIMSS EMRAM Achievement Assessment Report (AAR), you will have a clear picture of your facility’s maturity stage (0 – 7) and actionable insights on where strengths and opportunities exist related to focus areas: Data Capture and Health Information Exchange, Healthcare Analytics, Patient Engagement, Clinical User Adoption, and Resilience Management.

Additional Maturity Modeling

As noted with the DHI, HIMSS offers a variety of additional maturity models that can help your organization advance its digital health transformation, specifically around analytics (AMAM), community care outcomes (C-COMM), continuity of care (CCMM), digital imaging (DIAM), and infrastructure (INFRAM).

If you’re not sure where to start or what would be of most value, beginning with the DHI can provide a good indicator of the maturity model that makes the most sense for your organization.

Additional Assessment Tools

Many organizations with advancing digital health and transformation initiatives often express a desire to optimize specific capabilities or areas in their digital ecosystem and operating models. There are a variety of additional and tailorable assessments and tools available that allow healthcare leaders to understand how these areas may impact and create value in their broader digital strategies.

Common areas of focus for targeted assessment include:

• Patient Engagement – Answer and develop strategies that answer the following: What specific capabilities and feature sets offer your consumers convenience, personalization, and self-service? To what degree are these currently available and enabled across your platforms? How do other products and tools in the marketplace score when it comes to meeting your design needs?
• Virtual Care and Telehealth – Understand how your patient, provider, and staff experience are impacted by virtual care capabilities and workflow. Assess how effective your governance is when it comes to your virtual care and telehealth strategy.

Competitive Analysis  

While the HIMSS DHI and EMRAM offer a chance to understand your organization against globally recognized benchmarks, competitive analysis can also provide a chance to look at your organization’s digital capabilities against a targeted set of competitors. When making key decisions around differentiating consumer experiences and growth strategies, having a clear picture of what your organization needs to do to be at parity vs. leading in the market can steer key investments and resourcing.

Competitive assessments can be tailored to look at those in your current market, expansion markets, or even those with leading consumer experiences. Incorporating market forces and drivers can also support a more complete competitive analysis to inform your decisions for your digital ecosystem.

Next Steps

Just as providers seek to diagnose a problem before determining a treatment and care plan, your digital portfolio is no different. If you lack an understanding of what you need to fix, or are looking to maximize value delivery, examining what your organization does well and where opportunity lies is key before jumping into the Request for Proposal pool or kicking off too many pilots.

Each of the assessments highlighted above can be completed in a matter of weeks – not months. And this focused effort can help your team focus on the areas with the greatest ability to create value for your patients, clinicians, and teams.  

Last Modified: 1/15/2024