Madigan Army Medical Center earned the honor of being named one of the Most Wired hospitals in 2015 thanks to its use of technology across the board to positively impact patient care.

The Most Wired designation is awarded by the Hospitals and Health Networks magazine, which recognizes hospitals that are making progress toward greater health information technology adoption.

This year marks the 12th time in 13 years that Madigan was named Most Wired, thanks to the partnership between the Information Management Division and the Clinical Informatics Division, said Lt. Col. Robert Lang, the chief information officer here and the chief of IMD.

"Most Wired isn't just about having technology in the hospital -- it's about the meaningful use of the technology and the implementation of the technology to be used by the physicians and clinical staff and the administrative staff," said Lang, who explained that IMD provides the infrastructure and background technical support while Informatics uses this technology and knowledge management to improve outcomes, to correlate data, and to improve the lives of patients.

While the Most Wired award recognized Madigan's everyday operational excellence, it also looked at improvements such as a wireless upgrade for staff that increased coverage, speed and throughput. Madigan is also the test site for about 400 virtual desktops, which allow staff's desktops to virtually travel with them to any computer. Instead of looking up information for a patient in one's office and then looking it up again with a patient, the virtual desktop allows providers to see just where they left off on another computer; the software uses common access cards to identify which desktop to pull up.

While IMD provides the behind-the-scenes infrastructure for the hospital's technology, Informatics is using that technology in creative ways to provide IT products for primary care providers.

One of their biggest successes is the Primary Care Medical Home Huddle Tool, said Col. Eric Shry, the chief and program director of the Clinical Informatics Division.

"It's a team collaboration tool designed for talking about patients who you are going to see that day, and what their care needs are, if they were seen in the emergency room lately-- all the kinds of different things that are important for when you come to see your primary care provider," said Shry, who said the tool uses software to allow providers to see all of the medical history they'll need to know for the patients in one program as opposed to digging into four to six different systems. It is also going to be used across the Army later this year and will also be picked up by the Navy, he said.

In fact, "Madigan has led the way for a lot of years, and a lot of the systems that we have created here are either region-wide or (U.S. Army Medical Command)-wide, and in a lot of cases are going (Department of Defense)-wide," said Tim Wance, the media director for Informatics.

Informatics has also developed about 200 clinical dashboards which allow staff to view information in real time, such as which patients were discharged recently or who needs to come in for a diabetes check.

"The staff reports for patient monitoring allows the staff to address (issues) quickly and urgently," said Wance, who noted that these dashboards and other Informatics products can reduce errors in care delivery.

In addition, they've developed the Health and Readiness Medical Survey, an electronic questionnaire tool to build surveys which pulls from the military's electronic health records to incorporate personal information such as confirming the medications a patient is taking. Informatics is currently working on a mobile phone app for some of these surveys, to include one for pain management and another for post-deployment health assessments.

"We're trying to focus more and more on getting everything to the patient, and so everything we're doing is focused on moving information to the patient and getting the patient more engaged with their health," said Shry.

Almost everything Informatics works on is focused on getting healthcare information to patients' smart phones and hopefully getting that information back, Shry said. The idea is to text a patient that it's time to get an immunization, for instance, and then have them click a number to book it.

"So you deliver (healthcare information) to people when they need it, and you make it easy for them to do the right thing. That is absolutely where our focus here is," he said.