The Chester County Hospital's clinical information systems recognized among the Most Wired
The Chester County Hospital has been named to the 2013 Most Wired list by making great strides in establishing the basic building blocks for creating robust clinical information systems. This progress is aimed at improving patient care by adopting technologies to enhance patient documentation. In addition, these technologies advance clinical decision support and evidence-based protocols, reduce the likelihood of medication errors and rapidly restore access to date in the case of a disaster or outage.
"We have been getting steadily closer to the 'Most Wired' mark, and this is the first time we've made the list," notes Ray Hess, Vice President of Information Management at The Chester County Hospital. "The implementation of Soarian Financials moved us ahead, as did starting our Health Information Exchange work with Mobile MD."
Among some of the key findings this year:
- 69% of Most Wired hospitals and 60% of all surveyed hospitals report that medication orders are entered electronically by physicians. This represents a significant increase from 2004 results when only 27% of Most Wired hospitals and 12% of all hospitals responded, "Yes."
- 71% of Most Wired hospitals have an electronic disease registry to identify and manage gaps in care across a population compared with 51% of total responders.
- 66% of Most Wired hospitals share patient discharge data with affiliated hospitals, in comparison to 49% of the total responders. 37% of Most Wired hospitals do so with non-affiliated hospitals versus 24% of total responders.
"The concept of health information exchange is absolutely correct. We need to do it and do it in a robust, refined way," states Russell P. Branzell, president and CEO of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. "The answer here is standards, standards, standards. We need to standardize the entire process, which we've done in almost every other business sector."
The survey also covered some new areas such as big data analytics and patient generated data. An emerging practice, big data analytics looks at large amounts of data to uncover patterns and correlations. The 2013 Most Wired Survey is conducted in cooperation with McKesson Corp., AT&T, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the American Hospital Association.