Hospitals are widely criticized for not adopting information technologies more quickly. Many have taken a reactive posture, skeptically deferring the expensive purchases of technologies that can improve patient care and efficiency.
Yet others, a smaller number, are part of the growing wave of adaptive organizations that are ready to surpass their competition by leveraging technologies that integrate information sent from laboratories, patient beds, pharmacies, physician offices, and even patients themselves. These tech-savvy organizations are often referred to as "digital hospitals", but the term is one that has come to have different meanings and interpretations.
PricewaterhouseCoopers defines a digital hospital as follows: The digital hospital relies on technology as an integral and fundamental part of its business strategy. It enables organizations to fully realize a hospital’s latent potential for delivering higher quality care in increasingly efficient ways through the use of information technology and process redesign. The digital hospital goes beyond advanced clinical systems and includes significant additional integration between information technologies and medical technologies—such as patient beds, surgical equipment, nurse call and communications systems, pagers, and medical imaging technologies. A digital hospital strategy is not restricted to new-build or specialty facilities, but can also apply to general
hospitals.
Digital hospitals are able to compress processes, adapt to market forces, generate the quality data that payers increasingly demand, update the clinical data that physicians and patients expect, and prepare for reimbursement changes that inevitably will occur. We believe that healthcare organizations in the reactive mode, those that do not invest in digital technologies, will fall behind the digitally advanced group.
PricewaterhouseCoopers researched digital hospitals to examine this ability to provide patient care and be competitive in the market. We also analyzed the barriers that keep hospitals from becoming more digitally advanced, and highlight the lessons that other hospitals can learn from digital hospital pioneers. In developing this report, we analyzed previous research on the topic and data from public and private sources, as well as conducting primary analysis in conjunction with HIMSS Analytics. This research identified a group of 36 digitally advanced hospitals, chosen on the basis of their reputation in the industry for implementing advanced clinical systems.
Our research found that digitally advanced hospitals generally tend to have reduced length of stay, increased quality of care, and increased revenues. However, benefits may take years to realize and usually require significant investment.
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