Most Wired recognition continues
Once again, as it has over the past decade, UI Hospitals & Clinics has been named one of the nation’s most wired hospitals.
The 2018 Most Wired award, sponsored by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), ranked UI Hospitals & Clinics in the top quarter of the nearly 2,200 hospitals surveyed based on the hospital’s ability to adopt technology and use it to achieve optimal outcomes for its patients. Of the hospitals surveyed, only 254 earned the Most Wired recognition.
The award’s survey compares UI Hospitals & Clinics with peer institutions, showing top-of-class rankings for its investments in technology infrastructure and use of technology to control costs in key operational areas. It also ranked Iowa in the top fourth of institutions surveyed for use of technology to engage patients in their care.
“Over the past 20 years, UI Health Care has been a pioneer among medical centers, being an early adopter of an electronic medical record and providing a portal for patients to access their information directly,” Carmen says. “Today, for example, bar-coding for patient identification and safety is a standard hospital practice, and UI Hospitals & Clinics was among the first to demonstrate its value for quality care and implement it on a hospital-wide basis.”
Another pioneering effort Carmen describes is the practice of coordinating the work of medical equipment to place results directly into the patient’s medical record.
“A good example is our success in interfacing infusion pump technologies with the medical record,” he says. ”We have been able to improve the accuracy of the infusion data and eliminate manual record keeping by the care team. We’ve had groups from other health care organizations from all over the country reach out to us to learn from our success.”
Carmen adds that technology success stories like these depend on a great deal of collaboration.
“This recognition is the result of the strong partnerships in place at our organization between the technology staff and the clinical care givers,” he adds.