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Week Three: Discussion – Health IT Project Management

Richard Yeboah

Hello Everyone,

When planning a project for patients, I will consider patient participation. Patient participation has developed as a foundation of quality care and a commonly stated objective of healthcare organizations (Young et al., 2017). 

What does this imply? 

Such engagement has traditionally and typically centered on the relationship between patients and doctors in making care decisions or on how to strengthen patient efforts to control their care. There are significant initiatives to integrate patients in a broader sense, such as efforts to improve or restructure service delivery by incorporating patient experiences. 

The initial phase entails forming project teams while keeping stakeholders in mind. It will include representation from all departments: physicians, nurses, technicians, administrative personnel, medical records, clinical support services, and patient advocates. To make IT function, the team must collaborate with all stakeholders in dynamic and interconnected environments. 

Additionally, the team must offer plan highlights for addressing the areas, including requirements, design, and development. In addition, the team will devise a mechanism for continual engagement to implement the plan and a method for controlling it via flexible modification and repeating the process. 

There will be a level of interaction, consultation, involvement, partnership, and shared leadership in order to reach the final objective, i.e., patient engagement. When it comes to direct care, for instance, when a patient receives information about their illness, they will be asked about their preferred treatment plan. Treatment decisions will be based on the patient’s preferences, medical evidence, and clinical judgment.

Reference

Balgrosky, J. A. (2020). Understanding Health Information Systems for the Health Professions (1st ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Young, A., Tordoff, J., & Smith, A. (2017). ‘What do patients want?’ Tailoring medicines information to meet patients’ needs. Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, 6, 1186–1190. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sapharm.2016.10.006

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Week 3 Discussion

Minghao Ji

There is more than one way to carry out a project. Effective project management is a tactful art. It involves a systemic/methodical approach, yet requires flexibility.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) outlined five process groups: initiation, planning, executing, monitoring/controlling, and closing. It also organized the processes into 10 knowledge areas: integration; stakeholder; scope; human resources; time; cost; risk; quality; procurement; and communication (Varajão & Silva, 2017). These processes are often implemented at different levels; some may be focused more than others. A study shows that the top implemented processes by most project managers include determining the budget, developing schedules, collecting requirements, defining activities, defining scope, etc.; however, processes like quality management and risk management are often neglected (Varajão & Silva, 2017)

In order to best meet the stakeholder’s expectations, we can start the project by first identifying the stakeholders and planning stakeholder management, followed by defining the scope and collecting requirements. Poor support and communication from the stakeholders can adversely affect the outcome of the project. For the projects that focus on patients and staff, the stakeholders would be more interested in managing local resources, such as staff-to-patient ratio, equipment, and space availability, workflow planning and implementations, etc. While for financial sustainability and public health facing projects, the stakeholders would require us to pay more attention to outside factors and to be more fiscally responsible, able to identify current and future financial circumstances, familiar with government and insurance regulations, be comfortable engaging with multiple different disciplines and agencies in the health information system.

It’s impossible to find individuals that are experts in all subjects covered in the projects, and therefore, it’s important to implement human resources processes to pool a team with knowledge from various backgrounds. Doctors and nurses (inpatient and outpatient) have first-hand knowledge of medicine and direct patient care; administrative personnel has an in-depth understanding of the financial/billing aspect of the organization; ITs play a vital role in technology adoption. In the end, all personnel from different backgrounds collectively form the network of the information system.

The information system is the backbone of today’s organizations. When an organization applies the gathered data and information to advance its business purpose, it’s practicing business intelligence (BI). In addition to BI, healthcare organizations also practice clinical intelligence (CI) by using the information to further enhance their healthcare functions. Requirements for BI/CI solutions include security, extensibility/scalability, integrity, and performance(Balgrosky, 2020, p. 325). When we implement a project, we have to make sure the data is secure from internal and external threats by building a secure infrastructure and training the staff in properly handling of data. Extensibility/scalability is a concept that ensures that the current project will be able to accommodate future expansions. Data integrity and system performance often require optimization from IT techs, but they wouldn’t know how to best do this without inputs from the staff that interacts with data daily.

Project management in healthcare inevitably faces many challenges. For a team member, there are fundamental differences between project work and the ongoing healthcare service delivery, as well as the inter-professional collaboration between the two contexts (Chiocchio & Lebel, 2015). Additionally, “engaging in projects over and above their primary responsibilities adds considerable pressure and may be detrimental to their mental health and well-being” (Chiocchio & Lebel, 2015). A good project manager would take these human factors into consideration, and appreciate the fact that being a project team member involves “creativity and problem-solving at the system level” (Chiocchio & Lebel, 2015). We have to provide adequate training and support for the rest of the team to succeed and help them realize the value of the work they have done for the organization and for themselves.

References:

Balgrosky, J. (2020). Understanding Health Information Systems for the Health Professions. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Chiocchio, R, F., & Lebel, P. (2015). Multi-Level Efficacy Evidence of a Combined Interprofessional Collaboration and Project Management Training Program for Healthcare Project Teams. Project Management Journal, 46(4), 20–34. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21507

Varajão, C, R., & Silva, H. (2017). ISO 21500:2012 and PMBoK 5 processes in information systems project management. Computer Standards and Interfaces, 50, 216–222. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2016.09.007

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