Prisma Health Wins Prestigious Award for Technology Excellence
Prisma Health, the largest healthcare provider in South Carolina, has been named the winner of ECRI’s 2025 Health Technology Excellence Award. ECRI, a global independent healthcare and patient safety nonprofit, honors a member facility each year for implementing exceptional initiatives that improve patient safety, reduce costs, or enhance the strategic management of health technology.
Comprehensive Technology Infrastructure Upgrade
Prisma Health’s award-winning initiative focused on strengthening its technology infrastructure to support its rapid expansion. The health system, which encompasses 19 hospitals across 12 campuses, implemented a multi-layered approach to enhance its network infrastructure, improve workflow efficiency, and ensure business continuity.
Key aspects of the project included:
- Implementing a regional redundant network design to ensure 100% uptime
- Deploying a multi-carrier distributed antenna system for uninterrupted cellular coverage in hospitals
- Redesigning Emergency Department workflows with a secure “tap-in/tap-out” process for electronic health records
- Enhancing disaster recovery capabilities with new protocols and tools
Putting Infrastructure to the Test
The effectiveness of Prisma Health’s infrastructure upgrades was put to the test when Hurricane Helene swept through the region in September 2024. Despite widespread outages, Prisma Health’s proactive measures ensured that hospitals maintained EMR access, continued providing quality care, and restored full operations more quickly than surrounding healthcare systems.
“We’re proud of Prisma Health’s technology team for their commitment to reliable healthcare delivery,” said Daniel Leonard, Vice President of Technical Services at Prisma Health. “Their work has strengthened our infrastructure and workflows over the past five years.”
ECRI’s Chief Medical Officer, Dheerendra Kommala, MD, noted, “Prisma Health has demonstrated a system-wide commitment to safe, innovative technology deployment. They’ve established a blueprint for resilience that the entire healthcare community can learn from.”
About ECRI and Prisma Health
ECRI is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving healthcare safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Prisma Health is a private nonprofit health company with over 32,000 team members, serving more than 1.6 million patients annually in South Carolina and Tennessee.
