Anticlue

Most Wired Findings

As you are aware the most wired and most wireless survey has arrived! The article summarizing the findings and criticalities can be found here.

A couple of items in the article that caught my eye.

First, the way that the most wired hospitals go above and beyond the normal process.

• More than 90 percent of the Most Wired conduct either pre- or post-implementation return-on-investment analyses to justify expenditures, compared with only 59 percent of the least wired. The least wired are the 100 respondents who scored the lowest on the survey.


• The Most Wired have a wide variety of offerings available over the Internet for patient service and customer support, ranging from online patient registration to disease specific self-triage.


• IT education is a priority among the Most Wired hospitals and health systems. The Most Wired have doctors and nurses dedicated to IT training and support. The Most Wired are also beginning to offer continuing medical education credits to participate in technology training.


• The Most Wired have significantly higher adoption rates among doctors and nurses across a broad set of clinical activities, such as clinical order entry and results review, compared with the least wired hospitals.

Second, wiring relate directly to medication safety. Having a usable clinical system for medication orders allows medication safety to at the beginning of the ordering process, not the backend.

The least wired are also more likely to have medications that are ordered manually, meaning that the medication never appears as an electronic order. A whopping 20 percent of medications at the least wired organizations are ordered manually. This compares with an average of 3.1 percent of medications ordered manually at the Most Wired.

Once the order is in the system, the correct drug must be dispensed. Nearly 35 percent of the Most Wired say that the lion's share of their medications--81 to 100 percent--are electronically matched to the patient and order at the time of administration. This compares with only 5 percent of the least wired. And 84 percent of least wired organizations do not electronically match any medications to the patient at the time of administration

Finally the best point of the article is that training drives adoption, in other words people will use that which they are familiar with, you just need to get them over the fear of knowning hump.

According to survey results, more than 95 percent of the Most Wired have a nurse dedicated to IT training, compared with 41 percent of the least wired. More than 60 percent of the Most Wired have a physician dedicated to IT training, compared with 3 percent of the least wired. Eight percent of the least wired--roughly one in 12--do not provide any educational resources on IT whatsoever

Its a very good article and a great survey. I wonder where AMC came out in the survey...