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Hospital Planning Management Assignment Help
My hospital just started the process to switch to GENESIS Health System, and I just volunteered to be in the steering committee. The transition is going to take 15 months starting this September, so I will have the first hand experience in this implementation. This exercise is especially helpful and relevant to me, and allows me to analyze the implementation process systematically from a leader’s perspective.
First of all, this initiative to switch to GENESIS was decided by the Department of Health Agency (DHA), this could be a double-bladed sword. Since DHA is a such big client with countless facilities all over the nation and the world, the vendor will likely take DHA’s requests very seriously. On the other hand, we as one of the many DHA hospitals, do not get to choose which system to implement, and we may have limited decision-making power with the vender and with DHA. For example, if we would like to make a specific request with the developer, that request would have to be routed though our chain of command to the DHA for approval, and then to the vender in order to rewrite the program to meet our needs. Hence, we don’t have as much flexibility as smaller private hospitals, but we do get a lot of resources and support from people with immense experience and knowledge. I personally don’t have any previous experience with GENESIS, so many of my questions and concerns may have already been addressed and solved by others. Hospital Planning Management Assignment Help
The textbook breaks down the implementation into three phases: 1. foundational infrastructure, 2. basic core systems, 3. advanced capabilities. Each phase can be broken down into four stages: a. planning, b. system selection, c. implementation and production, d. ongoing support and evaluation. Each of the stages can be further broken down into manageable projects (Balgrosky, 2020, p. 216-240). However, with technologies change so rapidly nowadays, my concern is how feasible is it to follow these concrete steps.
Let me use an analogy. A modern popular video game takes about 3-5 years to develop. Imagine that while you are in the end stage of completing a game development, new hardware and software technologies have come out (i.e., releasing of new graphic cards that support ray tracing, or releasing of Unreal Engine 5 with enhanced light rending and AI features) (Banka, 2022). How would you like to proceed with your current game development plan? Here are the three options: Hospital Planning Management Assignment Help
- stick to the original plan with the outdated technology, and forgo the new features that are attractive to customers;
- postpone all deadlines, and implement the new technologies;
- minimize delay by upgrading to the new technology as you proceed the plan, but face potential compatibility conflicts between the new and old technologies.
Each of these options have its pros and cons. We could face the same situation when implementing a new health information system. All we can do is to present these options to the stakeholder and advice them on the pros and cons of each. Ideally, the vender has a good software development team who have future-proofed the system that are easily upgradeable. Unfortunately, it’s not always the vendor’s best interest to develop such system, unless we have specifically requested and contracted them to do so. Programs that are easy to develop may not be as user-friendly; programs that are user-friendly and come with all the bells and whistles may be harder to develop. Vendor may rather save the man power by developing a bare minimal program that is requested by the client, and implement various proprietary features to force the client to be dependent on vendor support; this way, they can bill the client in the future for all the supports and upgrades they provide. What the client would see is a relatively cheap system upfront, but costly to maintain in the future. If the client wants an easily maintained and future-proofed program, they may have to make these very specific requests, and face a more expensive upfront cost. These are also options we have to present to and advice the stakeholders.
A hospital’s other strategic planning may also impact the decision in HIS implementation. My last hospital had undergone an expansion to become a regional medical center over several years (Tew, 2017). And they have also planned to switch to GENESIS at some point. By separating the hospital expansion and HIS implementation, they were able to focus better on one project at time. An alternative would be to combine these two projects together, which would shorten the overall transition time and come up a more cohesive end product that better complements both projects, but it would involve much more complicated planning and cause major disruptions in hospital functions during the transition. However, if we had planned to implement new HIS before hospital expansion, we will also have to make sure that the new system will be able to support the expansion in the future. Hospital Planning Management Assignment Help
In addition to the vender and stakeholders, there may be additional outside factors that may impact the implementation of the new system. For example, other competitors have just implemented the newest technology, the softwares (older versions window server or red hat server) have reached the end of life cycle and will no longer be supported, upstream supplier are going out of business, cost increase due to global economy or pandemic, or even delay in production resulted from global microchip shortage, etc.
Balgrosky, J. (2020). Understanding Health Information Systems for the Health Professions. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Banka, M. (2022). The Day Before shifts to Unreal Engine 5 and gets delayed to March 2023. Spieltimes.com. Retrieved from https://www.spieltimes.com/news/the-day-before-gets-delayed-to-2023
Tew, E. (2017, June 27). Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune now officially a Medical Center. WNCT.com. Retrieved from https://www.wnct.com/news/naval-hospital-camp-lejeune-now-officially-a-medical-center/
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