The hospitals of Community Healthcare System have earned 2019 CHIME HealthCare’s Most Wired recognition, according to the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). The CHIME designation is for achieving Level 8 certification on a scale of one to 10. The Most Wired honor is given to hospitals and health systems that are at the forefront of using healthcare information technology to improve the delivery of care.
Community Healthcare System’s Most Wired hospitals include Community Hospital, Munster, St. Catherine Hospital, East Chicago and St. Mary Medical Center, Hobart. All of the hospitals are located in Northwest Indiana.
“Healthcare organizations across the globe are continually striving to raise the standard of care, pushing themselves and their peers to do better,” said CHIME President and CEO Russ Branzell. “We designed Most Wired to identify and share those leading practices so everyone can benefit. It is an honor to be among those that perform at the highest levels, knowing that the excellence they achieve will impact patients for years to come.”
“At Community Healthcare System, we are committed to providing safe, high-quality care in a compassionate and cost-effective manner,” said Donald P. Fesko, President and CEO, Community Healthcare System.“Using healthcare technology effectively allows us to be as efficient as possible while streamlining workflows for our providers. This enables them to focus even more on the reason we are all here; giving our patients the extraordinary care they deserve.”
A total of 16,168 organizations were represented in the 2019 Most Wired program. This year’s program included three separate surveys: domestic, ambulatory and international. The surveys assessed the adoption, integration and impact of technologies in healthcare organizations at all stages of development, from early development to industry leading.
Chief Information Officer Jesus Delgado said that it is very important to have healthcare and technology working hand in hand to optimize and provide the highest quality experience to patients.
“We have found that patients are looking for care from hospitals that are innovative and have high technology capabilities,” he said.
To that end, the IT team coordinated efforts to gather answers and submit surveys on behalf of each Community Healthcare System hospital to CHIME for evaluation.
“Questions ranged from patient engagement, analytics and data management, business and administrative management, clinical quality and safety, disaster recovery, infrastructure, interoperability, population health and clinically-integrated network-accountable care organization, to security,” he said. “We are able to use the results from the CHIME survey and scores to identify strengths and any opportunities for improvement.”
This is the second year that CHIME has conducted the survey and overseen the program. Last year CHIME made numerous improvements to the survey, governance and scoring methodology. This year CHIME added an ambulatory survey in addition to the domestic survey, expanded international outreach and incorporated an improved method of enabling participating organizations to better benchmark their level of adoption and outcomes achieved. The new system includes Most Wired certification at a level that reflects an organization’s overall performance.
For more information about the programs and services available at the hospitals of Community Healthcare System, visit COMHS.org.
