Getting Major Health IT Projects Right Is not Easy!

Everyone would agree that the track record of major Health IT projects is not a glorious saga of inevitable success and great outcomes. Indeed it often feels that quite the reverse is true.

I came upon this article the other day and was impressed by the pragmatism and common sense of the authors.

http://www.hhnmag.com/hhnmag_app/jsp/printer_friendly.jsp?dcrPath=HHNMAG/Article/data/09SEP2007/070911HHN_Online_Kropf&domain=HHNMAG

Making Information Technology Work
By Roger Kropf and Guy Scalzi
To ensure that an information technology project is a success, health care leaders must first define the benefits, then manage the project and realize its benefits.

How do you define a successful information technology (IT) project in your organization? Most of us could probably agree with “on time, on budget and used productively by the intended staff.” But this happy occurrence is much rarer than it should be in health care.

One organization enjoying success of this kind is University Hospitals (UH), a multihospital system with headquarters in Cleveland (www.uhhospitals.org). A few years ago, UH instituted changes in IT governance and project management that have substantially increased the percentage of IT projects that are on time and on budget—from 50 percent to 90 percent.

Among the changes at UH was involving health care managers in IT projects from beginning to end. Managers at UH, and at any organization, must perform three major tasks to obtain value from investments in IT: define the benefits, manage the project and realize the benefits.

…. (see URL above for full article)

The approach outlined in the full article seems to me to be very sound and I commend a reading of the full article to all blog readers.

The authors have clearly done all this many times. Here are their very brief biographies.

Roger Kropf, Ph.D., is a professor in the health policy and management program at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in New York City.

Guy Scalzi, M.B.A., is executive vice president of Veloz Global Solutions, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif.

The authors have recently published a book, Making Information Technology Work: Maximizing the Benefits for Health Care Organizations, available from AHA Press.

I would have to say – and I have no interest of any sort in the book – that this may be a very useful read for many Health CIO’s

David.