Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust has successfully achieved HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6 accreditation, reportedly for its work on optimising and integrating its EPR.
According to the HIMSS website, Stage 6 EMRAM is awarded for organisations leveraging health tech for advanced data exchange and interoperability for improved patient engagement, clinical efficiency, and departmental insights.
Claire Orchard, the trust’s deputy CIO, posted the update on LinkedIn, claiming the recognition is not the result of one big push, but rather “hundreds of small, deliberate ones performed by staff across all our hospital sites”.
Orchard praised a number of the trust’s colleagues in helping to reach the milestone, citing work including closed-loop barcode scanning compliance, testing of business continuity processes, and optimising its EPR.
Frimley Health was able to demonstrate its full adoption of longitudinal care records within the EPR through integration with the Thames Valley & Surrey Care Record, she noted, “so that clinicians can see a patient’s full care journey, not just the bit that happened under our roof”.
Looking ahead, the focus will be on Stage 7, with Orchard stating: “As we push onto Stage 7 alongside our New Hospital Programme, HIMSS keeps us honest about where excellence actually sits – and more importantly, where we need to do better.”
Wider trend: Digital maturity
HTN was joined for a webinar exploring the role of the CIO now and in the future by a panel of experts including Ravi Sahota Thandi, interim operational CIO at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust; Kate Warriner, chief transformation and digital officer at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and #1 in the CIO 100 rankings; and Rhian Bulmer, chief customer officer at Radar Healthcare. Our panel shared their own experiences, discussed the role of the CIO in supporting and developing digital maturity and skills, delivering 10-Year Plan priorities, and what the next 5 – 10 years will look like. Also noted were emerging technologies and opportunities, along with ways of realising digitally-enabled system working.
NHS England has published the latest Digital Maturity Assessment report for 2024 and 2025, offering a system-wide view of digital maturity by trust and ICB. By including 2024 data alongside latest 2025 scores, it offers further insight into progress for each organisation. Key findings for the period April to June 2025 include that whilst 93 percent of providers are using an EPR, only 30 percent have “fully integrated bi-directional data flows”. 90 percent of providers report having a central data repository, with two-thirds of these including both clinical and non-clinical data; and “almost all” providers state that their staff can access a Shared Care Record, with 90 percent having the ability to do this directly through their EPR or single sign-on to the Shared Care Record system.
The board of Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust (HDFT) offered an update on EPR implementation, plans to continue to improve digital maturity scores, and a roadmap to 2028. By April 2026, the trust hopes to put in place new processes to realise benefits, achieve paper-lite, deliver HIMSS Level 5, reduce the number of patient record systems, and reach 90 percent in the EPR Digital Capabilities Framework. This will involve designing, testing and building the EPR; training end users; and going live with new ways of working. Beyond this, to 2027/8, the focus is on system optimisation and enhancing EPR with ePM.
