July 11, 2013

Rick Moore

TriHealth has been recognized as one of the nation’s Most Wired health systems, according to the results of the 2013 Most Wired Survey, released in the July issue of Hospital and Health Networks magazine.

TriHealth was one of 16 hospitals or health systems in the state of Ohio ranked among the nation’s Most Wired for 2013. This marks the fifth time TriHealth has received this award, also having won in 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2012.

The nation’s Most Wired hospitals are making great strides in establishing the basic building blocks for creating robust clinical information systems aimed at improving patient care. This includes adopting technologies to improve documentation, advance clinical decision support and evidence-based protocols, reduce the likelihood of medication errors and rapidly restore access to data in the case of a disaster or outage.

In order to be considered for the award, organizations must meet requirements in four areas including; Infrastructure, Business and Administrative Management; Clinical Quality and Safety (inpatient/outpatient hospital) and Clinical Integration (ambulatory physician/patient/community).

“Meaningful use has been a top priority for CIOs and health systems, but understanding all of the data will be critical as new relationships continue to evolve,” said Rick Moore, Chief Information Officer for TriHealth. “Data analytics will be essential to helping health systems quality of care and cost requirements in a new environment of performance- based reimbursement and evidence-based medicine.”

Health Care’s Most Wired Survey, conducted between January 15 and March 15, asked hospitals and health systems nationwide to answer questions regarding their IT initiatives. Respondents completed 659 surveys, representing 1,713 hospitals, or roughly 30 percent of all U.S. hospitals.

“This year’s Most Wired organizations exemplify progress through innovation,” said Rich Umbdenstock, President and CEO of the American Hospital Association. “The hospital field can learn from these outstanding organizations ways that IT can help to improve efficiency.”

Among some of the key findings this year:

• Sixty nine percent of Most Wired Hospitals and 60 percent of all surveyed hospitals report that medications orders are entered electronically by physicians. This represents a significant increase from 2004 when only 27 percent of Most Wired hospitals and 12 percent of all hospitals responded Yes.”
• Seventy-one percent of Most-Wired hospitals have an electronic disease registry to properly identify and manage gaps in care across a population compared with 51 percent 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,” said 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.”