Best Hospital IT 2016: #1 Small Hospital
Thibodaux Regional Medical Center, Louisiana
IT Staff: 15
Overall Score: 77.37%

Technology and clinical staff members at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center in Thibodaux, Louisiana, have for the past year been focused on care transformation through the use of information technology.

"We've been combining big data analytics with physician improvements and going after the Triple Aim of lowering costs, improving quality and increasing patient engagement," said Bernie Clement, CIO at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center.

"We've been leveraging data platforms, analytics, Six Sigma and lean technologies and have reaped some great outcomes and improvements," he added. "Our biggest wins have been around sepsis, our total joint program and pneumonia care."

In recent years, IT itself has transformed at the regional medical center, which also took the top spot in the small category in 2015.

"IT has gone from operational things like taking the paper record to electronic, to now where it's transitioning to how to add value to all of this electronic information," Clement said.

Healthcare IT News Best Hospital IT Departments 2016: 
⇒ Meet the winners
⇒ CIOs reveal what makes an IT shop great 
⇒Interactive map: Best Hospital IT Departments 

"For example, with care transformation, you now take that full EHR and perform analytics and understand what the real drivers of great care are. And then the ability to get that understanding into the hands of your caregivers and your patients and ultimately really change what we do in the hospitals."

Moving forward, Clement said Thibodaux, among other things, must shift to a single, all-encompassing EHR.

"The level of integration you need between different venues of care makes it incredibly difficult, even with interoperability standards, to make value-added care happen," he said. "So one of the biggest things we need to get to is a single medical record across ambulatory and acute care settings.

"That's longer term," he added. "But in the near-term, we are deploying secure texting that will help improve how our care teams coordination with each other, and help us deliver clinical alerts to our care teams. So now we can send alerts not just in the EHR but if the need is substantial enough and immediate enough we can rely on secure texting alerts to get information to our people that much quicker.”

Workplace culture was one of 87 questions senior executives (CIO, CMIOs, etc.), directors of IT, clinical and systems analysts, technicians, help desk staff and others responded to on our survey.

Overall Ranking