Harris Health System recently received a Most Wired award, its ninth in the past 10 years, from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). The award recognizes its significant use of information technology to improve patient care.
With this year’s ongoing threat of COVID-19, Harris Health’s information technology staff rallied quickly to ramp up the virtual care and telemedicine program for patients. In six days, the program grew exponentially to provide patients with timely medical visits while minimizing the potential for in-person virus infection. Since March, the virtual program has provided more than 300,000 virtual patient visits with nearly 1,500 participating physicians.
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, major areas of our organization partnered to ramp up our virtual care platform to ensure that our patients maintained access to care,” says David Webb, vice president, Epic Integrated Systems, Harris Health. “Between April and August, 64.1% of outpatient visits have been provided by telemedicine modalities.”
Harris Health achieved a Level 7 designation in this year’s rankings. It signifies the organization has deployed technologies and strategies in areas like population health/cost-of-care analytics, health information exchange/integration engines and patient portals to help it achieve meaningful clinical and efficiency outcomes.
“It’s an honor for Harris Health to receive recognition from CHIME,” says David Chou, senior vice president and chief information officer, Harris Health. “Since I sit on the CHIME board of directors, I have the privilege of understanding that the ‘Most Wired’ award criteria is not easy to achieve. So kudos to the Harris Health information technology and information security team.”
According to CHIME, the mission of the “Healthcare’s Most Wired” program is to elevate the health and care of communities around the world by encouraging the optimal use of information technology. The program does this by conducting an annual survey to identify, recognize, and certify the adoption, implementation and use of information technology by healthcare provider organizations. This is intended to improve patient safety and outcomes by driving change in the healthcare IT industry.
This year, CHIME used a Level 1-10 classification to better benchmark participating organizations based on their adoption and outcomes achieved through their use of technology.
“Our highest score on the survey is in the area of clinical quality and safety,” Webb says. “The industry best practice features that we have implemented in our electronic health record, as well as other technologies implemented by the IT department, helped to contribute to this rating.”
Harris Health is among 15 hospitals certified at acute level 7-10 and 13 hospitals certified at ambulatory level 7-10 in Texas. It ranks among five other healthcare systems recognized from greater Houston in either acute or ambulatory category.
The annual survey recognizes hospitals and healthcare systems for their leveraging of information technology to improve performance for value-based healthcare in areas of infrastructure, business and administrative management; quality and safety; and clinical integration.