Each year, Healthcare IT News publishes the list of Healthcare’s Most Wired Hospitals. From this list, I’m sure a lot of CIOs rejoice. I know a lot of PR people use this ranking in their press releases for healthcare IT companies. There’s even a fair number of hospitals on Twitter that have been proclaiming their listing on the Most Wired Hospitals list.
As most of you know, I’m skeptical of most lists and this is no different. I was pretty intrigued by the findings of a survey that was done of the Most Wired Hospitals. Here are some of those key findings:
- 93 percent of Most Wired hospitals employ intrusion detection systems to protect patient privacy and security of patient data, in comparison to 77 percent of the total respondents;
- 74 percent of Most Wired hospitals and 57 percent of all surveyed hospitals use automated patient flow systems;
- 90 percent of Most Wired hospitals and 73 percent of all surveyed use performance improvement scorecards to help reduce inefficiencies;
- 100 percent of Most Wired hospitals check drug interactions and drug allergies when medications are ordered as a major step in reducing medication errors.
The findings above try and show a significant difference between those hospitals that are wired and those that aren’t. However, I must admit that I’m quite disappointed that these are the key points that they looked at when comparing a wired hospital vs other hospitals. Are these really the results we want to see from wiring our hospitals? I like the question about patient flow systems which I wrote about yesterday, but it seems like they left off some important areas of a wired hospital. Maybe the survey didn’t find any improvement in those areas.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Most Wired Hospitals and these findings.
