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By Michael Eggebrecht
New Hanover Regional Medical Center is facing a future where computerized physician order entry, electronic medical records, remote access to patient information and automated delivery of medical results are integral to U.S. healthcare.
But less than two years ago, it was clear that New Hanover, which has two campuses in Wilmington, N.C. and a third in Burgaw, N.C. and is licensed for 855 beds, didn't have the IT systems it needed to reach the necessary levels of automation.
In evaluating information technology capabilities, "we recognized that our service levels were far too low; our ability to raise those service levels was far too limited," says CIO Avery Cloud. "Our level of customer satisfaction certainly wasn't where it needed to be. And the stability of our environment was not up to supporting where we needed to go."
Hence Project S, which Cloud named after the three areas the hospital wanted to stabilize: systems, services, and level of satisfaction. Project S, which started 18 months ago, is actually comprised of about 90 subprojects. New Hanover's nearly 90 IT staffers were all involved in the initiative to some degree, according to Cloud, who joined New Hanover five years ago from Integris Health in Oklahoma City, where he was CIO.
The IT resources available to healthcare organizations are stretched more than in any other industry, says Cloud. "The only way that you're going to overcome that deficit is either to work people to death or give them automation tools."
And while IT has spent years automating the departments it serves, the same can't be said about the IT department. "At many organizations, IT is the least automated department in the company," notes Cloud. "And even worse, it's the least integrated. So you'll see a lot of IT shops that have best-of-breed one-off tools -- each specializing in one or two things -- but no overall scheme to manage the metamorphosis of data."
For Project S, which is nearly complete, the hospital turned to Compuware Corp.'s Vantage and Changepoint software. New Hanover is using Changepoint for demand management, which includes everything from the initial phone call that triggers a project, to the time-keeping records for that project, to the reporting required for constituents, the project prioritization process and the annual budgeting process.
Vantage, which is used by more than 2,500 companies worldwide and 75 healthcare organizations, helps monitor systems. "Each system has to meet response-time thresholds; it has to meet availability thresholds," says Cloud. "It has to generate the user experience the user wants, not the experience that IT thinks is appropriate. We needed a tool to help us get a handle on what the user is experiencing."
Vantage gives his department predictive capabilities, says Cloud, allowing it to tackle a potential issue before it develops into a full-blown problem. The software lets IT "notify customers that something is broken rather than have them notify us," he says. It also keeps the hospital's vendors honest "by having the ability to internally diagnose where applications are performing well or not so well, and where the problems might be centered."
The hospital evaluated tools from Microsoft, IBM and Computer Associates before deciding on Detroit-based Compuware. Other companies' products didn't have the same level of integration, says Cloud. "These tools future-proofed us because they have the capabilities to expand into a greater number of areas that we needed to automate," he says. Had New Hanover opted for another vendor, "We believed we would have found ourselves buying a bunch of one-offs to cover."
Cloud's IT department is also dedicated to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, methodologies. A lot of Compuware's tools are built around ITIL, he adds.
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