By Kelly Phillips, staff writer
The nation's top tech-savvy hospitals tend to use information technology to
create a strategic advantage with nurses and other clinical staff as well as
with patients, according to the executive editor of Hospitals & Health
Networks.
That fact and several others came from studying six years of data from the
publication's annual 'Most Wired' survey. Alden Solovy, executive editor of
Hospitals & Health Networks, contrasted the most and least wired hospitals
in a presentation at the American Hospital Association's Leadership Conference
in San Diego on July 26.
Hospitals in the most wired group "zealously" stick to their plan when it
comes to technology, Solovy said. That means those hospitals end up spending
what they predicted in previous surveys that they would.
"They have a vision of what they want to do with it, and they implement it,"
Solovy said. "What you find time and again is that the 100 Most Wired are
spending what they said they would spend on technology, while the least wired
said they would spend much more [than the Most Wired], and then ended up
spending much less."
Information technology is an integral part of strategy at the Most Wired
hospitals, Solovy said, with strong relationships between the chief executive
officer and the chief information officer at those hospitals.
The Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study appears in the July 2004 issue
of Hospitals & Health Networks. The study is developed by the magazine,
IDX Systems Corp. and the College of Healthcare Information Management
Executives.
In the staff education department, 96 percent of the top wired hospitals have
nurses dedicated to information technology training, compared to 41 percent at
the least wired. Use of physicians dedicated to IT training was reported by 61.4
percent of the most wired hospitals, compared to 3 percent of the least wired.
"It's clear...that most hospitals are relying on nurses to do the clinical
training for IT," Solovy said. "While the Most Wired have also added physicians
to that practice, it appears the core responsibility for keeping the clinical
staff up to speed on IT falls to nurses, which is a huge responsibility."
Looking at physician electronic order entry, Solovy said there was a 10-fold
difference between the most and least wired hospitals shown in the 2004 survey:
26.9 percent of pharmaceutical orders were electronically entered by the doctor
at the top wired hospitals, compared to 2.7 percent of orders at the least
wired.
With electronic order entry by nurses, it was 11.7 percent of orders at the
Most Wired and 6.3 percent at the least wired.
When it comes to electronic medical records, 90.1 percent of the Most Wired
hospitals were offering online access to the current medical record—defined
as observations, orders and progress notes—compared
to just 16 percent of the least wired hospitals, Solovy said.
Hospitals have been working on the core components of the electronic medical
record for years, Solovy said, and that will only grow in light of the federal
government's recent push for a health care information technology
infrastructure. He believes the industry is making good progress on the core
components of the electronic medical record.
One thing remains a constant: the hospitals that earn top technology honors
generally stand far above others in that capacity.
"Year in and year out, we find the Most Wired are way out in front of the
industry in general and the least wired in particular," Solovy said.
Resources:
View the Hospitals & Health Networks' Most Wired article.
Read another recent story on this topic: Hospitals Ranked as 'Most Wired' are Adopting Electronic Medical Records
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