Hospital Overhauls Information System

http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/hoag-memorial-finds-better-care-through-data-sharing/d/d-id/1319836?print=yes

This article from InformatonWeek talks about a hospital group in California, Hoag Memorial Presbyterian, which transformed their previously “unconnected applications” into a streamlined, easy to navigate dashboard.

Information gets fed into a data warehouse, which translates the data and presents it in a user friendly format on the hospital’s dashboard.

The article points out that the company needed to go through cultural as well as technological change to implement this system.  The system now connects the IT team with the other business units throughout the hospital: finance, clinical, and administrative; all of which collaborate more easily with the system in place.

At the time of implementation, “intense data usage” was not the norm, and the staff needed to be educated on the processes. Once the system was fully in place, the employees had a much better understanding of the resulting data, mainly because of the user-friendly dashboards.  Any employee, from medical to business staff could “make inferences on the data from previously unconnected and unrelated systems.”

Prior to the overhaul of the system, the Electronic Health Record (EHR) was only used by 2.5% of the clinicians. The percentage of use is now in the high 90’s!

Questions:

1. Does the enterprise information system seem sustainable for the future?

2. Are there any disadvantages to an enterprise information system?

3. Examples of an enterprise information system?