Please take the CHIME Digital Health Most Wired (DHMW) survey, which this year is adding more reporting on long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC), to help benchmark progress in interoperability.

In addition to the opportunity for your organization to be recognized as one of the Most Wired LTPAC organizations, the DHMW serves as a comprehensive “Digital Health Check-up” for healthcare organizations across the world. This year, organizations can assess their LTPAC entities. This year CHIME also created a separate LTPAC survey; in the past, organizations took a single survey that included acute and ambulatory care as well as the skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) in their system. The 2022 survey also adds questions on security and analytics/data management.

This year, vendors and consultants may submit surveys on behalf of their clients, which saves time for healthcare organizations. Finally, this year CHIME created a Digital Health Analytics (DHA) portal, where participants can create an account, through which they can submit survey data, and see digital health benchmarking reports. The survey will close on June 13th, 2022.

Last year’s survey found that interoperability in healthcare is not distributed equally by the type of provider organization and that a formalized relationship can help acute-based healthcare organizations fully exchange data with external providers. The 2022 DHMW survey will help determine if or how this has changed—and how the long-term and post-acute care community answers these questions.

2021 Findings

The 2021 Digital Health Most Wired (DHMW) survey analyzed responses from 439 health systems to these questions:

• Which of the following entities can your organization send discrete data to?
• Which of the following external entities can your organization consume discrete data from?

 The list of entities included External hospital/hospital systems, External physician practices, Home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, and extended/chronic care facilities. Findings included the following:

• Most hospitals (at least 75%) are capable of sending and receiving discrete data from external providers. This percentage soars to 95% when isolating hospital-to-hospital exchanges.
• Sending data is more common than consuming data. Without exception, the percentage of hospitals claiming to be able to “initiate” a data exchange was consistently greater than those reporting to be able to receive discrete data.
• Data exchange capabilities vary by the type of external organization. The percentage of hospitals capable of sending or receiving data with other hospitals or physician practices is near-universal. However, this capability notably drops when considering data exchanges with home health agencies and SNFs, as expected.
• Hospitals are more capable of fully exchanging data with other hospitals than any other type of care site: 2% more hospitals are capable of sending discrete data to another hospital than the percentage capable of receiving data from another hospital. This “data exchange gap” increases remarkably when evaluating the exchange capabilities with other provider types, especially for those largely involved in supporting the care needs of older individuals.
• Organizational “diversity” helps facilitate data exchanges. Hospitals associated with diverse care sites tend to be able to more fully exchange data with varied types of provider organizations than those with uniform care sites.

 Extensive resources on the 2022 survey and past results are available. We encourage you to take this digital health check-up, and maybe you’d receive the Most Wired recognition.