St. Elizabeth Healthcare’s IT department ranked among best in the country by industry publication

NKyTribune staff

Healthcare IT News has revealed the 20 winners of its 2016 Best Hospital IT Department Awards and St. Elizabeth Healthcare is on the list.

St. Elizabeth ranked fourth of five hospitals chosen in the “Large” category.

To be considered as a qualifying Best Hospital IT (information technology) Department, at least 50 percent of a team’s staffers had to take a Healthcare IT News survey. All told, more than 4,300 hospital IT employees completed the poll.

Nominations opened May 24, and 97 different IT departments nationwide made their case.

On July 21, each of the nominees was emailed a link to a secure online employee satisfaction survey, and instructed to distribute it among all department staff: management, supervisors, full-time and contract employees.

Collection of survey data ended on August 26. Of the nominated hospitals, 44 met the 50 percent participation threshold.

Of these finalists, 10 qualified for the “Super” category (200-plus IT employees), eight for the “Large” category (76 to 199 employees), 10 for the “Medium” category (26-75 employees) and 16 for the “Small” category (25 or fewer employees).

Healthcare IT News provided the following profile of the St. Elizabeth Healthcare IT department:

For St. Elizabeth Healthcare’s Vice President and Chief Information Officer Alex Rodriguez, health IT’s current trajectory is placing patient engagement and improved communication with clinical staff front and center.

Edgewood, Kentucky-based St. Elizabeth’s current initiatives in these areas involve mobile technology and it’s already having an effect on current processes.

“The introduction of this technology will require us to revisit current workflows and redesign – in some instances from scratch – new ways of doing business,” Rodriguez said.

St. Elizabeth is currently working on the transition from a fee-for-service model, into value-based care. In doing so, the organization hopes to deliver better care to its community.

Rodriguez and his team have supported the health system for eight years, working to standardize its care delivery through the use of an enterprise electronic health record and enterprise financial platform.

“We now intend to accelerate our efforts to harness the clinical and financial data available to our clinicians and model outcomes that reduce expense, improve clinical outcomes and looks at the total patient experience across out continuum of services,” Rodriguez said. “Although the transition to a value-based delivery care model is changing slower than expected, we do believe that the long-term direction of healthcare reimbursement is committed to this transition of value based care.”

For Rodriguez, the most difficult change in health IT was the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) across both the acute care setting and physicians’ office. While meaningful use incentives fueled this major shift, the widespread adoption in such a short time has been a surprise.

However, he doesn’t see the shift in a negative light. The IT department is highly connected to the rest of the health system, which makes for better communication and patient care. Rodriguez does admit this puts greater strain on his department to stay ahead of evolving security risks, but his team is constantly working to keep up with the challenge.

Researchers at HIMSS Analytics, a global healthcare advisory firm, crunched the numbers with Healthcare IT News to determine this year’s winners.

“Using multivariate analysis, the results were analyzed and weighted according to the relative importance measure for each qualifying question response, from which we were able to calculate a composite score for each qualifying organization,” said Brendan Fitzgerald, director of research at HIMSS Analytics, in explaining the ranking criteria. “We took it a step further and analyzed the relative importance of each individual indicator for the detailed questions to come up with a detailed score summary.”

Healthcare IT News will roll out a series of articles, charts and infographics throughout the month of November to explore the effects of a variety of factors on workplace morale. The series will include supplemental information derived from HIMSS Analytics’ Logic database and other data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services.