Hospitals and Health Networks has released its annual ranking of the most-wired hospitals in the US. The journal also ranks the 25 most-improved, most-wireless and most-wired small and rural hospitals. Most wired hospitals are much more likely to have most of their physicians using CPOE and medication alert systems -- 41 percent versus 27 percent for all hospitals surveyed and 8 percent for the least-wired. Incidentally, these numbers seem to significantly overstate the accepted number of hospitals that other survey organizations such as KLAS say have installed CPOE. KLAS last month showed that only 4 percent of hospitals had CPOE. Perhaps more importantly, the most-wired hospitals also have lower mortality rates -- 7.2 percent lower than average.
- see this story from The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.)