There were three District Health Boards that stood out from the crowd in the survey released earlier this year by the Ministry of Health about electronic medical record adoption in New Zealand, and they all had one thing in common: they were the first to introduce an electronic medications management system, essential for reaching stage five of the HIMSS EMRAM hospital inpatient score.

Waitemata, Canterbury and Southern DHBs all scored above stage five while the rest averaged about 2.3 in the survey, the latter on par with Australian hospitals but both lagging many of parts of the world.

Exactly what the HIMSS EMRAM score is and how it relates to the New Zealand setting is the subject of a half-day workshop being hosted by the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics team's Tina Hashim, along with the director of the northern electronic health record (NEHR) program for the Northern Regional Alliance (NRA) Will Reedy, in advance of the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Auckland next week.