'Most Wired' Hospitals Recognized

Hospitals recognized as the "most wired" in the country by a new American Hospital Association publication lead the way for less-wired peers in several areas, including:

• Electronic prescribing. Sixty-seven percent of most wired hospitals order medications electronically, compared with 46 percent of all hospitals responding to a survey conducted between Jan. 15 and March 15 by the hospital association, McKesson Corp., HIT Exchange and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.
• Computerized standing orders based on scientifically proven treatment protocols. Eight-six percent of the most wired hospitals follow such standing orders, versus 58 percent of all hospitals.
• Recovering and restoring lost digital clinical data. Eighty-two percent of the most wired hospitals can restore data within 24 hours, versus 57 percent of all hospitals.
• Encrypting data on mobile devices. All of the most wired hospitals encrypt data for laptops, and three out of four do so for smartphones. For all hospitals, the data-encryption figure is 85 percent for laptops and 57 percent for smartphones.

Those details were reported by Healthcare IT News, which had access to information from the survey in the July issue of the AHA's Hospitals & Health Networks magazine. The list is available online, but the article detailing the survey and findings is not yet available.

The annual survey, redesigned this year, uses "a new structure and methodology with an increased use of analytics and reporting," according to the Most Wired website. Hospitals were evaluated based on progress in adopting, implementing and using health IT technology to improve:

• Infrastructure;
• Business and administrative management;
• Clinical quality and safety for hospitals; and
• Care continuum for physician, community and ambulatory facilities.