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Providing more than $20 billion for healthcare IT funding between 2009 and 2014, the Federal stimulus plan is revitalizing the dialogue surrounding the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and related clinical applications. Despite the enormous sums involved, money alone cannot change a fundamental IT truth: An application is only as useful, interoperable and reliable as the infrastructure that it runs on.
To understand whether hospitals have the end-to-end infrastructure and clinical applications needed to be successful, the CDW Healthcare IT Checkup weighs the drive for increasingly sophisticated clinical applications against the data center and client technologies needed to enable them. Based on multiple indicators (strengths) and contraindicators (challenges), survey respondents evaluated and assessed the extent of their organizations' clinical application programs as well as the underlying strength of their IT infrastructure.
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CDW Healthcare's IT Checkup Self-Assessment Tool enables healthcare IT professionals to compare their clinical application and IT infrastructure investments against a national sample of their peers.
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CDW Healthcare surveyed 500 clinical and IT hospital professionals to:
- Evaluate the perceived importance and extent of clinical application adoption
- Assess the capacity of IT infrastructure
- Examine the impact of increased infrastructure investment on clinical application performance
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Based on data secured from the national survey and CDW Healthcare's expertise, the CDW Healthcare IT Checkup Index's ten indicators and four contraindicators represent the elements of an overall healthcare IT initiative. The CDW Healthcare IT Checkup Index sets a national benchmark to gauge the impact of infrastructure investments on clinical application performance and outlines steps for improvement.
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- Clinical Applications Always, Infrastructure Sometimes
- By both objective and subjective measurements, hospitals view clinical applications as having a greater impact on patient care than IT infrastructure
- Cost Over Caregiver Adoption
- When implementing clinical applications, hospitals prioritize product features such as cost over caregiver adoption and interoperability
- Turns Out, the IT Infrastructure and Client Technologies Matter
- Those providers making significant infrastructure investments (40% of IT budgets or more) are experiencing better performance from their clinical applications
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- Support & Reliability Top Challenges
- Hospitals report help desk/user training and end user operation lag times are the top challenges related to clinical applications
- Clinical Applications
- Overall, respondents believe clinical applications have a greater impact on patient care than infrastructure - 67% of all respondents said that clinical applications were critical to patient care, while only 50% viewed infrastructure with the same importance
- Survey participants noted a number of challenges encountered during clinical application initiatives, including excessive helpdesk/end-user training (46%), significant lag times (28%) and unreliable performance (21%)
- Application features such as client interoperability and usability drive quick adoption and long-term value. Many hospitals, however, are focusing on aspects such as cost, missing an opportunity to engage with clinicians
- Infrastructure
- Those hospitals investing in IT infrastructure reap dividends in application performance - hospitals experiencing "outstanding" performances from their clinical applications are investing significantly greater percentages of their overall IT budget on infrastructure
- Hospitals that view infrastructure as "critical" to quality patient care are more likely to realize benefits from their clinical applications than those that view infrastructure as less important
- Hospitals that devote significant internal resources to network management are nearly twice as likely to experience reduced operating costs from applications than those who outsource all network management - 51% to 27% respectively
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- CDW Healthcare conducted an online survey of hospital IT and clinical personnel in February 2009
- A total of 500 respondents completed the survey
- The sample size equates to a +/- 4.33% margin of error at a 95% confidence level
- Calculating the CDW Healthcare IT Checkup Index:
- The IT Checkup Index consists of 11 ranking questions based upon the indicators and counterindicators referenced previously
- Each response is accorded a point value based upon the degree to which the response indicates relative application or infrastructure strength
- In order to determine the national average, separate scores for the clinical application and IT infrastructure categories were tallied, then compared against a possible per-category score of 100
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