2013 Most Wired

H&HN's 15th annual survey shows U.S. hospitals have made big strides in laying the foundation for robust clinical information systems. The next step: harnessing IT for the real work of improving care delivery.

Many of the nation's hospitals and health systems have made progress laying the building blocks for creating robust clinical information technology systems. Now comes the heavy lifting as they look to connect the care continuum, protect patient records in an increasingly mobile world and turn all of those bits and bytes of data they are collecting into actionable information.

As evidenced in Hospitals & Health Networks' 15th annual Health Care's Most Wired Survey, a good percentage of hospitals and health systems have deployed technologies that improve patient 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.

That wasn't always the case, even as recently as 2007 when just 58 percent of Most Wired hospitals had systems capable of producing real-time alerts on drug-to-drug interactions. Fast forward six years and 100 percent of Most Wired hospitals now possess that capability, a major step in improving patient safety by reducing the likelihood of medication errors. Going back even further, in 2004, only 27 percent of physician medication orders at Most Wired hospitals were done electronically. That number is now up to 69 percent and climbing.