Anticlue

Prioritization of Projects

One of the key things that needs to be done in a healthcare organization is to centralize the prioritization of projects through the hospital administration.

It just seems to be key. First of all the IT resource pool is not vast and unlimited. Based upon 50,000 + discharges per year, the average number of IT FTE in a hospital is 83. That number significantly drops to 49 IT FTE for organizations with 20,000 - 49,999 discharges per year. (Statistic from the HIMSS Solution Toolkit May 20, 2004)

Of those employees, they don't all work for one centralized IT department. Maybe 70 - 80% do work for the IT department. Then others staff the individual departments IT staff. For example the clinical ancillaries: pharmacy, radiology, surgery, and labs may all have departmental IT staffs consisting of 1 - 4 people. The billing groups, technical and professional, will also have IT staff of 1 -2 people. If you are fortunate enought to have an academic center, they may also have IT staff of 1 - 5 people. Also the clinicians may have an dedicated IT staff of a couple people.

So here is the quintessential problem, departmental initiatives effects are not only limited to a department. The effect is far reaching and touches elsewhere, and then uses IS resources. Also the business becomes confused as to who is IT and who is not, and responsibility is very unclear.

If you bring the initiatives up a notch to the hospital administration, then you have a centralized group. This group sets the organizational goals and then IT initiatives can relate directly to the organizational goal. Departments bring the opportunities before the group, the group discusses the organizational benefits, hopefully agrees on a course of action, and then the expected result. Every so often the group reconvenes to re-establish the priorites or if adjust based upon a new iniative being brought into the fold.