By Bob Violino

Sept. 14, 2009—Intermountain Healthcare, a nonprofit integrated health-care system consisting of 21 hospitals and more than 100 clinics in Utah and southeastern Idaho, is known for its innovative use of technology to improve services. In 2008, the Salt Lake City, Utah-based provider was cited in the annual Hospitals & Health Networks' Most Wired study as being one of the nation's most technology-savvy health-care organizations. It marked the ninth time in 10 years that the survey— a joint project of Hospital & Health Networks, Accenture, McKesson, the American Hospital Association and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives—ranked Intermountain Healthcare among the nation's most wired organizations.

Intermountain has been developing computerized health records since the 1970s, and is now working on a project with GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, to develop the next generation of electronic medical records. The company is relying on homegrown clinical systems until the jointly developed system is ready. The health-care provider serves as a strategic development partner of GE Healthcare in building advanced decision-support and knowledge-management tools, as well as other functionality for GE Healthcare's Centricity system, an integrated clinical, financial and administrative system.

Lab analyzer with specimen delivery track in front

In one of its latest forays into technology, Intermountain Healthcare has implemented an RFID system to improve the speed and accuracy of laboratory testing. The company's lab directors and managers took note of research data from a hospital in Montreal indicating that each handoff of a lab sample—from a physician to the courier to the lab, for instance—added approximately 10 minutes from the point of specimen collection to the time it takes for the physician to receive test results. So if the process involved four handoffs—not uncommon in a typical testing scenario—that could mean up to 40 minutes of additional time.