Nemaha County Hospital Named 2010 Most Wired

CHICAGO – July 7, 2010 Nemaha County Hospital has been recognized as one of the nation’s MOST WIRED, according to the results of the 2010 Most Wired Survey released today in the July issue of Hospitals & Health Networks magazine. Nemaha County Hospital is the only hospital in Nebraska to make the 2010 Most Wired list. The 2010 Most Wired survey results are the basis of several awards:

• Most Wired: 99 organizations whose responses reflect “Core” development
• Most Wireless: 25 organizations focused on wireless applications
• Most Improved: The 25 organizations not appearing on the Most Wired list who improved the most from 2009 to 2010 in the survey focus areas
• Most Wired – Small and Rural: The 25 small and rural organizations not appearing on the Most Wired list that reflect development in survey focus area

To create this year’s list of 99 Most Wired hospitals, Health and Health Networks, in cooperation with McKesson Corporation and CHIME spent 2 years in development, field review and post-survey testing.
Kermit Moore, COO of Nemaha County Hospital states, “In the past, Nemaha County Hospital has competed for awards in the small and rural categories. We earned the Most Improved Award in 2006 and in years 2008 and 2009 we earned the award for Most Wired for Small and Rural Hospitals. In 2010 we earned the Most Wired Award. Our commitment to an electronic medical record provided us the opportunity to benchmark ourselves against every health care organization in the United States, regardless of size. This category includes hospitals of all sizes from a 20 bed facility such as Nemaha County Hospital, to a hospital system with over 4000 beds. This is truly an honor to be recognized among organizations both large and small.”
“We have aggressively pursued the use of information technology because we understand that its use can help us to improve the quality and safety of the services we provide to our patients as well as complete other business processes in a more efficient and effective manner”, states Marty Fattig, CEO of Nemaha County Hospital. “We have never installed technology with the goal of winning awards or for technology’s sake alone.”
Hospitals understand the importance of health information technology (IT) and the benefits of its widespread adoption, yet as an industry they still face significant barriers to implementation according to a newly released survey of America's Most Wired hospitals and health systems.
This year’s survey reveals continued progress for hospitals in patient safety initiatives:

• Fifty-one percent of medication orders were done electronically by physicians at Most Wired hospitals, up from 49 percent last year.
• Over half (55 percent) of Most Wired hospitals match medication orders at the bedside through bar coding or radio-frequency identification, up from 49 percent in 2009 and from 23 percent five years ago.
• Additionally, Most Wired hospitals have made improvements when it comes to sharing information during care transitions. For example, new medication lists are electronically delivered to caregivers and patients 94 percent of the time when a patient is transferred within the hospital, 98 percent at discharge and 86 percent when transferred to another care setting.

“The survey results highlight that continued progress is being made but the full potential of health IT has not been meet,” says Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association (AHA). “Hospitals embrace health IT and recognize the many benefits it can provide to patients, but even Most Wired hospitals face barriers to adoption. We have asked that the federal government stimulate greater adoption by making Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments more widely available to hospitals and physicians so more hospitals can move in this direction.”
Stacy Taylor, CFO of Nemaha County Hospital credits a team approach, “All of our staff have diligently worked towards achieving this award. We look forward to continually raising the bar on quality using information technology to better serve our patients and community enhancing our mission of ‘Quality Care - Every Time’.”