Topic- You are the CIO for a small community based hospital that has 250 beds. Costs are high, and reimbursement rates are low. The hospital has the immediate need to improve operating efficiencies within all of the current HIS. In your tough market, the imperative to drive down costs is a primary goal to improve operating margins. The hospitals goal is to improve patient safety, utilize patient data to drive outcomes, and reduce costs by 15% in the upcoming planning year. It is thought that the move to an Electronic Health Record (EMR) could help make that cost reduction realized. Currently, you have disparate systems all over the hospital that you are looking to integrate through an EMR. You currently have no efficient integrations in the facility. All the systems are currently in silos, therefore, making aggregating patient data terribly difficult. Additionally, you are faced with the implementation of ICD-10 to which your organization has not planned for. You are starting the budgeting cycle for the next calendar year which you have earmarked $1,800,000 for expansions to your IT budget including post ICD-10 efforts. One of the primary challenges is the alignment of the IT function in the hospital. Currently, you are responsible for the IT deployment and it currently sits in a top down silo within the organization. You get limited participation from the operating departments in respect to the IT deployments. Additionally, your clinical documentation is behind the industry. To bridge this gap, you are considering adding staff into your personnel in the upcoming year, and maybe reorganizing the IT function to include ICD-10 and data analytics experts to help with the documentation issues. You are contemplating if this is the right move. You are also considering adding the role of the business analyst to the IT function to maximize HIS project success and plan projects accordingly. Lastly, we have 200 clinical staff that we are looking to give mobile devices to (iPads/iPhones). They are claiming to the Executive Board that they could be 20% more productive if they had the mobile technology and utilizing telemedicine. This mobility will allow them to access patient and clinical systems which they cannot do at the moment from anywhere. The move to mobility requires you to purchase 250 devices and manage them securely within your network which you are gravely concerned about. The primary concern is HIPPA.

Below are your challenges:

1. Outline at a high level your strategic plan for the upcoming year. Outline what you are the CIO intend to accomplish given these conditions.

2. What is your plan to implement the EMR? Outline your approach to planning and implementation.

3. Discuss the selection process you use for selecting an EMR vendor. This implementation will provide you all the patient data you need from admission to discharge as well as outpatient services. Select a vendor from current vendors in the market. Describe the value you expect to achieve from this implementation and describe the vendor selection process (why you went with this vendor)

4. What processes do you implement to ensure IT enabled project successes?

5. Describe how you protect patient data within your systems to ensure there are no HIPPA violations if you go the route of telemedicine (or not- explain why you dont do this).

6. Are there other types of applications or emerging technologies that may help the current conditions? If so, which and how would you implement to get user buy in? 7. How do you intend to make use of the aggregated patient data that the EMR will make available to you to assist clinical staff in patient outcomes? Describe what this roll out looks like within the organization.