Hospitals with stronger IT infrastructures perform better than those with less developed infrastructures, according to a survey of 500 U.S. hospital-based IT and clinical healthcare professionals conducted by CDW Healthcare of Vernon Hills, IL.
Seventy-one percent of providers who spent at least 40% of their budget on IT infrastructure reported outstanding performance from clinical applications, compared with 29% of respondents who spent less on IT infrastructure. Respondents who reported that IT infrastructure was critical to quality patient care reported reduced operating costs more frequently (57% versus 41%) and a higher level of patient satisfaction (50% versus 36%).
The survey revealed that healthcare professionals often focus on application features and functions more than client technologies that speed caregiver adoption. When implementing clinical applications, clinical capability (59%) and cost (50%) were identified as top concerns, compared to interoperability (30%) and ease of caregiver adoption (26%).
Prolonged user training (46%), a lack of interoperability (28%), significant time lags during clinical usage (28%), and unreliable performance (21%) were identified as primary challenges to hospitals that had already deployed various healthcare IT applications.
Server virtualization, power optimization utilization, branch circuit protection, internal network management, and use of patient/caregiver videoconferencing all were attributed to reduced operating costs. The complete survey is available at www.cdwg.com/itcheckup.
Related Reading
Healthcare IT saves lives, cuts costs, study finds, January 27, 2009
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