How Healthcare IT News picked its 2011 best hospital IT departments

Many things may strike you while reading about the winners in Healthcare IT News' first-ever "Where To Work: BEST Hospital IT Departments." But perhaps most importantly, the best IT departments demonstrate deep respect for employees and appreciate their hard work.

That was this project's goal: Determine what characteristics distinguish the best departments from all the rest. To do that, employees graded their IT departments across seven categories: day-to-day work, IT team, management, hospital leadership, workplace culture, training and development and compensation.

From start to finish, it's been quite a ride, and the 25 hospital IT departments that made the long journey to the top deserve kudos for creating workplaces where employees thrive and have fun while working incredibly hard.

How we ranked them

This project began back in May. That's when Healthcare IT News hired Critical Insights, a market research company based in Portland, Maine, to create and administer a statistically valid program that would identify exceptional hospital IT workplaces. The multi-stage program spanned four months. It included a nomination period, followed by a confidential, online 67-question employee survey and, finally, a data-analysis period to determine the top hospitals.

Overall, 179 hospitals were nominated for "Where To Work: BEST Hospital IT Departments." To qualify for the program, roughly half of a department's staff had to complete the online survey. In the end, 75 hospitals qualified, and overall, a total of 4,945 IT employees competed the online survey.

To level the playing field, we divided hospitals into three categories: small (100 or fewer licensed beds); medium (101 to 350 beds) and large (351+ beds). The IT departments that scored highest in the areas that matter most to employees came out on top. Of the 75 hospitals that qualified for the study, 33 were large, 28 medium and 14 small. (Due to the small sample size for the small hospitals, Critical Insights considered this data less stable and, thus, less reliable for analysis. That said, the range of scores for all three size categories are consistent.)

Data crunching

As a means of interpreting some of the results, the study used an index where a score of 100 is considered "average." Here's how all IT employees who took the survey ranked the importance of workplace satisfaction categories addressed in the study:

- Satisfaction with elements of their day-to-day work (116)
- Satisfaction with their immediate work unit, team or IT department group (107)
- Satisfaction with the organizations' workplace culture (104)
- Satisfaction with senior management and organizational leadership (97)
- Satisfaction with training, professional development and advancement (96)
- Satisfaction with their direct supervisor or manager (93)
- Satisfaction with compensation, benefits, and employee recognition (87)

All of these criteria are important, of course, but some, as the employees indicated, are more important than others.

As part of the project's final 72-page report, Critical Insights had this to say about the results:

In examining study data, it is notable that the most "important" dimensions that strongly influence employee satisfaction tend to be more subjective, less pragmatic factors such as feeling respected in the workplace, believing that work provides a sense of accomplishment and a meeting of shared goals, having a strong spirit of cooperation and effective communication at work, and having a favorable sense of staff morale. Conversely, more pragmatic measures such as satisfaction with benefits and perceptions of having sufficient staffing and budgets tend to have less influence in affecting satisfaction.

The top performers in "Where To Work: BEST Hospital IT Departments" excel in the areas that IT employees consider most important, but, as you'll see, they take all seven of the project's workplace traits to heart.