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Thu, Oct 29 2009 6:04 PM EST
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It’s become a reoccurring theme here in the California desert: should you charge full-bore with an IT implementation in hopes of chasing those highly-touted stimulus dollars, or take a more a patient and deliberate approach and avoid severe penalties down the road?
Linda Reed, vp of information systems and CIO at Atlantic Health, during a session this morning on ARRA readiness said each institution needs to do a full assessment—not just an IT assessment, but an organizational assessment—to answer that question.
There are a lot of things to consider, she said:
- What are the priorities in your current IT strategic plan? Would you have to shuffle the deck and put some things on hold?
- What’s your capability to archive, retrieve and report quality indicators?
- What’s your level of compliance with privacy and security protocols?
- What is your level of physician adoption? You can install CPOE, for instance, but how many docs are using it?
Reed said an assessment will highlight your gaps and how long it may take to catch up. “You have to think about what year you are aiming for,” she said. Which is more costly, rushing an implementation, or taking a couple of years of penalties? How ready are your vendors to supply a certified product?
After doing its assessment, Atlantic has decided to go for stimulus dollars. Reed thinks they’ll be able to deploy a certified system—recognizing that no one knows what that means at the moment—by 2012.
Matthew Weinstock, senior editor of H&HN, is blogging live from CHIME 2009.
