The answer to whether or not it matters is going to come down to the answers to a few basic questions:
Is a multiple department or system-wide solution warranted?
Which executive oversees the decision process?
A department solutions decision.
The simplest scenario.
Let’s say that the problem is a single department problem. The answers to the two questions are:
Is a multiple department or system-wide solution warranted? (No)
Which executive oversees the decision process? (Department head)
An example might be an endoscopy department where the endoscopes have outlived their expected term of use. It’s not likely that the director will have to be concerned that their decision will impact any other departments as no other department is likely to use the same type of scope.
A system-wide or multiple department solution decision.
System-wide solutions tend to be rare. After all, what problems do departments like accounts payable, lab and patient access, HIM, etc. have in common?
However, when a multi-departmental need does arise, the answers to the two questions are:
Is a multiple department or system-wide solution warranted? (Yes)
Which executive oversees the decision process? (Often hard to determine)
When the situation does arise where there is a shared problem in many or all departments of a health system, the answer to the question, “Does a solution exist that adequately solves for each department’s problems such that a mutually satisfactory decision can be made?” becomes extremely important. Solving for the greatest number of stakeholders becomes an impactful endeavor.
Can you answer: Who’s watching anyway? Is there a leader high enough in the reporting chain that has authority over all the departments that could be impacted by a solution? Perhaps there is a leader or a committee that would be interested to know that many or all the departments represented by the committee might be impacted.
Let’s take the example of the accounts payable, lab and patient access, and HIM departments. They all share a problem relating to what to do with classifying and indexing documents to an information system. Lab and accounts payable have a need to abstract data as well. The executive over all these departments certainly goes well up the management chain. Does the executive have visibility to the problem? Is it a big enough problem that independent decisions by the departments would impact the executive’s KPIs negatively enough for them to oversee it directly or delegate it down the management ladder?
Certainly, IT and IS are impacted. It’s likely a relevant committee exists to solve for redundant interface implementations. If they have to implement an individual solution for each of the departments, IT’s and IS’s time (an already scarce resource) goes up.
If a project originates in a single department, it may seem in the best interest of the department director to act independently in order to avoid complexities and lose control. However, if that leader is looking to expand their impact, it’s better to find where similar problems exist, and ally themselves with the directors of those departments, leadership that is impacted by multiple solutions to a similar problem, and IT and IS committees that seek to solve for redundant interface problems. A simple fact: The higher up the management ladder a problem extends, the better the odds of getting the project approved!
Through careful consideration and knowledge of who in your organization shares your problems, you have the opportunity to improve your own situation as well as your organization’s operations as a whole.
About the Author: Norm Kruse
Norm is a Business Development Manager with experience in HealthCare and Telecommunications technologies. He earned his BS – Business Administration at Winona State University and his MBA – IT Concentration at the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota. Technology applied to workflow design is a focused area of interest.