Arnot Ogden Medical Center Earns “Most Wired” Distinction

ELMIRA — Arnot Health’s Arnot Ogden Medical Center was named to the 2013 Health & Hospital Networks (H&HN) magazine’s “Most Wired” list based on the results of H&HN’s Health Care’s Most Wired 2013 survey.

This is the fourth time Arnot Ogden Medical Center has been recognized as a “Most Wired” facility, Arnot Health said in a news release. It received the national honor for its meaningful use of health-care information technology.

“Every step we take from an information systems perspective is to improve our organization’s delivery of superior clinical outcomes, patient safety, and overall satisfaction,” Gregg Martin, Arnot Health’s chief information officer, said in the release. “The healthcare industry’s IT needs are evolving and Arnot Health is proud to be on the industry’s leading edge — simultaneously creating greater efficiencies for our care providers and our operations team by providing safe, secure, and reliable data in real-time.”

This year is the 15th anniversary of Health Care’s Most Wired Survey. In that time, hospitals and health-care systems have made strides in establishing the basic building blocks for creating robust clinical information systems aimed at improving patient care, according to the Arnot Health release. This includes adopting technologies to improve patient documentation, advance clinical-decision support and evidence-based protocols, reduce the likelihood of medication errors, and rapidly restore access to data in the case of a disaster or outage.

“This year’s Most Wired organizations exemplify progress through innovation,” Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association (AHA), said in the release. H&HN is a publication produced by the AHA. “The hospital field can learn from these outstanding organizations ways that IT can help to improve efficiency.”

The survey’s key findings this year include:

§  69 percent of Most Wired hospitals and 60 percent of all surveyed hospitals report that medication orders are entered electronically by physicians.

§  71 percent of Most Wired hospitals have an electronic disease registry to identify and manage gaps in care across a population compared with 51 percent of total responders.

§  66 percent of Most Wired hospitals share patient discharge data with affiliated hospitals, in comparison to 49 percent of the total responders.

The 2013 Most Wired Survey also covered some new areas such as big data analytics and patient-generated data. An emerging practice, big data analytics looks at large amounts of data to uncover patterns and correlations, according to the release.

§  32 percent of Most Wired hospitals conduct controlled experiments or scenario planning to make better management decisions.

Health Care’s Most Wired Survey, conducted between Jan. 15 and March 15, asked hospitals and health systems nationwide to answer questions regarding their IT initiatives. Respondents completed 659 surveys, representing 1,713 hospitals, or roughly 30 percent of all U.S. hospitals.

Founded in 1898, the AHA is a not-for-profit association of health-care provider organizations and individuals. It says it provides education for health-care leaders and is a source of information on health care issues and trends.

Arnot Health says it provides diagnostic, ambulatory, secondary and tertiary acute care, as well as rehabilitative and wellness services to the Southern Tier of New York and the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania. The three-hospital regional health-care system, an independent, not-for-profit organization, has a total of 709 licensed beds, including 478 acute care, 231 long term care, 40 physical medicine rehabilitation, 25 psychiatric, and 20 substance abuse rehabilitation. The system currently has more than 300 physicians from more than 50 specialties.