3-PEAT TECH
YRMC deemed a ‘Most Wired’ hospital for third year
With the world of technology ever changing, Yuma Regional Medical Center is aiming to keep up with advances and was recently named a Most Wired hospital for the third time.
“The Most Wired hospitals are using every available technology option to create more ways to reach their patients in order to provide access to care,” AHA president and CEO Rick Pollack said in a statement. “They are transforming care delivery, investing in new delivery models in order to improve quality, provide access and control costs.”
The results of the 19th Annual Health Care’s Most Wired survey, released by the American Hospital Association (AHA) Health Forum, recognized hospitals that are utilizing technology to improve accessibility for patients. The HealthCare’s Most Wired survey is conducted between Jan. 15 and March 15 every year.
Frederick Peet, chief information officer for YRMC, told the Yuma Sun in an interview that the hospital was not on the list for the Most Wired hospitals for close to a decade.
“I’ve been here almost 11 years and we did not win this award for the first eight years,” Peet said. “We’ve spent a lot of time building that technology up to receive our first award in 2015.”
With the three-year streak of landing on the Most Wired hospitals list, Peet added that he feels YRMC is on track to adhere to patients’ needs in the future.
“It means that we are positioned now to the next five years from a technology standpoint to be able to provide what those patients-who may not need a lot of healthcare now but as they get older and as they raise children-they are going to need that and we know technology is going to be a central element in that care,” Peet explained.
The survey and benchmarking study includes 698 participants, representing an estimated 2,158 hospitals or more than 39 percent of all hospitals in the U.S. It examines how organizations are leveraging IT to improve performance for value-based health care in the areas of infrastructure, business, and administrative management; quality and safety and clinical integration, the AHA association showed.
“Annually around September or October we will get the links to the benchmarking reports,” Peet said. “We want to be careful but we look at hospitals of our size and typically we try to compare as much as we can to our patient population, our demographics of our patients and we look at them and we say ‘okay, how do we compare?’ because they give us a score in the benchmarking.”
The CIO of YRMC stated that the benchmarking score is used as a look into what may be working for other, comparable hospitals when it comes to their use of technology.
“We are not necessarily going to use it to make a definitive decision about technology but it’s another data point for us to look at — is there a technology solution that will help us and our patients?” Peet said. “It’s hard to be on the cutting edge sometimes of a lot of technology or what we call the ‘bleeding edge’ which is not really a proven technology. But, we need to stay up on technology and that’s what the Most Wired award sort of validates for us is that we have put in the operational dollars and energy to put ourselves in a place where technology plays a role in healthcare.”
Peet noted that as the hospital is “not on paper anymore” the organization has implemented an online way for patients to access information.
“We’ve implemented technology that allows for secure remote access when needed to patient information from physicians. We have a patient portal called MyCare so patients can access their information, download it, print it off and see their list of medications.”
According to the survey, YRMC is one of only five hospitals in Arizona to be honored this year. Other honorees are located in the Phoenix Metro area, Tucson and Prescott.
“There are a lot more than five hospitals in Arizona,” Peet said. “Either they are not taking the survey or they are just not quite there yet. For me, this (award) means that we are keeping up with technology in today’s world and thinking about Generation X or millennials and their use of technology. They want to use that technology to find a health care provider, deal with physicians etcetera and it’s good for us to not only understand that, but the back-end technology that makes that work, we have to be able to provide that and that is a lot of what we have in place today.”
Peet explained many of the technological strides YRMC has made are not necessarily ones patients often come in contact with or see in the hospital’s dayto-day operations, but they are occurring nonetheless, such as cyber security.
“Part of the IT infrastructure that we have has to deal with cyber security and implementing technology that helps us attain a secure environment,” Peet said. “We have a lot of technology in-house and it’s continuing to evolve and continuing to change and every year the Most Wired survey — they modify their questions and thus possible answers-so you can’t just acquire some technology and say ‘well we are good’ and be done with it. We are constantly evolving and changing the technology in the organization and trying to improve our ability to deliver healthcare, document on that healthcare, provide access to our patients and our staff and put in mobile solutions.”