Intermountain Healthcare is again the only Utah healthcare provider named to this year's Most Wired Hospital list by Hospitals & Health Networks, the journal of the American Hospital Association. Intermountain has been named one of the nation's most technologically savvy hospital systems in 12 of the 13 years the survey has been conducted.
Assessments were based on achievement in four areas of focus: infrastructure; business and administrative management; clinical quality and safety; and care continuum. This year, 530 healthcare organizations, representing 1,388 hospitals, were evaluated.
Intermountain was featured in this year's report for its partnership, created in 2005, with General Electric to jointly create the next generation of medical information systems for hospitals. Intermountain is widely known for its work developing and using computerized medical systems since the 1970s.
The idea is to give clinicians information on protocols and clinical pathways at the point of care, according to Chris Wood, MD, medical director of information services at Intermountain Healthcare. "The challenge for all of us in healthcare is to get quality data out of our systems to assess our care processes in a meaningful way."
A complete listing of the rankings is at Hospitals & Health Networks.