by Ted Eytan, on 17 May 2007 04:42 pm
The Journey
“An Amazing Feeling”
This was a quote from a colleague manager of one of our information systems teams today. She told me this from 300 miles away, where she is spending the week with information technology colleagues, nurses, and doctors, at one of our medical centers, installing new clinical decision support tools for our entire health care system. These tools are intended to help prevent cervical cancer.
On its face, it would seem the height of inefficiency to transport a high performing information technology team 300 miles away from their colleagues, from the servers, from their managers, to implement a product like this. What CFO would support this?
What we know now is that we aren’t building an I.T. product - we are supporting the product the patient is expecting - lifelong health and a patient-physician relationship where needs are anticipated. The support tools must be created as close to the patient as possible to meet the highest first time quality and critical to quality expectations. And they must be created efficiently.
The amazing feeling happened, she told me, when a physician working in the medical center let her know that the tool that her team turned on today, supported the physician in initiating screening for cervical cancer for a patient who was in for another reason but was overdue. She told me that she didn’t imagine that her work on an enterprise computer system would directly impact a patient that very day. From where I sat, I was imagining that the patient probably didn’t realize that someone 20 feet away, rather than 300 miles away, was improving the system she depends on to anticipate her needs. I read this story to our team back in Seattle as an example of a great accomplishment for our patients.
In the old days, I would get the feedback (good or bad) from our clinical staff, and the technologists would be the nameless, faceless IT department (the old adage “I.T. is most successful when it is invisible”). How much better, though, is it that the person doing the work for the patient, gets to see the impact for the patient? A lot.
We talked more about the process and she mentioned that it was a bit frustrating in the morning testing the tool to work and putting it into the live system. She said, “I was hoping to have 2 whole days to test this out.” Now she only has one and a half.
I joked that I was impressed that here we were complaining that something that should take several months to do using a thick-process should take 2 and a half days instead of 2 days.
So… 2.5 days instead of 2.5 months, clinical staff using tools that they develop themselves, seeing the impact of performing for patients and letting others know about it, better FTQ and CTQ. Asking the question again: What CFO would support this?