STANFORD, CA – Stanford Hospital & Clinics is embarking on a seven-year connected health technology initiative to improve patient care and operational efficiency. The goal is to continue to advance Stanford's patient care platform, which connects the hospital and outpatient clinics to create a near-paperless electronic medical record.

Stanford has engaged the Palo Alto, Calif.-based consulting firm Accenture to help it enhance clinical processes and deploy new capabilities, including business intelligence, health analytic tools and patient-centered technology. Accenture will assume certain operational and administrative responsibilities for Stanford Hospital's information technology environment.

"Our goal is to utilize technology to benefit patients while assuring that we have the most advanced capabilities and a cost-effective solution for managing operations," said Stanford CIO Carolyn Byerly.

Stanford Hospital will migrate to Accenture's virtualization offering, which will be a key component of the hospital's new technology infrastructure. Accenture will manage applications and infrastructure including applicable data centers, network, help desks and device support.
 
"Few hospitals have reached Stanford's technology sophistication and application of IT to patient care," said Mark A. Knickrehm, global managing director of Accenture's health industry practice. "We are honored to have been selected to help achieve their technology vision. The use of IT in healthcare is growing dramatically and our support to Stanford Hospital demonstrates the value of Accenture's connected health vision to hospitals."

Stanford Hospital earlier this year received the highest-level designation for use of its electronic medical record system from HIMSS Analytics. Stanford Hospital is one of six hospitals nationwide among more than 5,000 in the HIMSS Analytics database to achieve Stage 7 – the top level. Stanford Hospital was recently named to the "Most Wired" list in the annual Hospitals & Health Networks survey.