ECRI, a national patient safety nonprofit, recently named Greenville, S.C.-based Prisma Health the winner of its 2025 Health Technology Excellence Award.
In the last five years, Prisma has quickly expanded to become South Carolina’s largest health system, according to an ECRI news release.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene tested the 19-hospital system’s care coordination strategies, emergency preparedness and technology infrastructure.
Primsma has a redundant network design to accommodate organic expansion and acquisitions. The design features two connection hubs per region to connect primary and secondary data centers. The health system also has a multi-carrier cellular distributed antenna system to ensure full coverage for staff and patients.
These network designs, along with efforts such as standardizing emergency department workflows and preparing business continuity plans, helped the system when Hurricane Helene struck.
“Like all health systems in the area, Prisma Health was impacted, but thanks to the improvements made through this project, the organization found itself well positioned to fulfill its mission both during the storm and throughout its aftermath,” according to the system.
Daniel Leonard, vice president of technical services at Prisma Health, noted that the system’s primary level 1 trauma centers maintained connectivity with the Epic EHR, communications continued despite widespread cellular outages, and power and connectivity were restored to the two hardest-hit hospitals within 10 hours.
