Each function of the system may be separated into tasks to further increase re-use opportunities for the services. For example the function for registering patients may be separated into the tasks. “Find or view patient Record”, “Create or update patients record”, verify legibility of insurance”, “document history” and other activities that are completed during the registration process of a patient. The granularity enables other applications and services to use parts of the “patient register” function.
Task like “find or view patient record” may be used by most of the organization whereas other tasks like “create or update patient record” can only be used by the admission and front desk staff. The leadership of Philips in interoperability can be seen at the incorporating the Health care Enterprise (IHE) Interoperability show case at the Health care Information and Management systems society (HIMSS), annual conference in New Orleans in February and March 2007.
According to Jack Harrington, Senior Director, Integrated Solutions for Philips Medical Systems and Technical co-chair of the IHE Patient Care Device Domain, as medicine become more personalized, sharing and collecting quantitative patient data requires common standards in order to help efficiently assess patients throughout the health care continuum. He continues saying that improving the liability to share information across the enterprise, from imaging systems to patient monitors to other patients care devices, fosters a clinical environment where data can be easily consolidated and cross-referenced.
Standardized data sharing, together with clinical decision support applications are expected and this will lead to faster and more insightful diagnosis, enabling clinicians to make better and quicker treatment decisions (Mukherji, 2002). The IT Challenge Practically, almost all healthcare organizations perceive IT as a key enabler for innovation, collaboration, and process improvement. But most of them also have a range of incompatible, remote systems in place.
Majority of these applications do a excellent job of supporting committed processes like lab tests, radiology, and medication schedules, but it’s very expensive and time-consuming to create new applications that can support innovative processes – especially when they span system or organizational boundaries. With applications tightly coupled to committed business processes, it’s also complicated to improve existing processes in response to new market demands or to achieve access to information that resides in disparate, remote systems.
Barriers like these hinder the potential for innovation and impede collaboration between internal departments or other external partners involved in patient treatment. The net effect of an inflexible IT landscape is ineffectiveness: redundant lab tests, duplicate data entry, long processing times, and unwieldy admission, treatment, and billing processes (Spewak, 1992). The Economic Benefits of EA The fundamental benefits of enterprise architecture can be summarized using three key words; better, faster, cheaper (BFC). It is important to understand that the BFC benefits come at a price.
You must be prepared to invest in the underlying organizational and cultural structures to support them. It is required to recognize that these costs exist and make sure that the BFC benefits you achieve outweigh them. A holistic Enterprise Architecture approach can deliver a lot of benefits to institutions or organization depending on the focus where they find these benefits. Also the Enterprise Architecture delivers the foundation for Enterprise Portfolio Management, which is an ultimate business driver for Enterprise Architecture.
Enterprise Architecture has been the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure, reflecting for the joining and standardization requirements of the businesses operating model. Research shows that firms go through some stages of Architecture maturity as they learn to implement and utilize the strategic capabilities of Information Technology. Understanding each of the maturity stages helps firm invest wisely and maximize benefits ranging from faster IT response times to optimized strategic effect on IT.
While thinking about the importance of integrating health care systems to connect patient care throughout the hospitals, Phillips of the leading Royal Phillips Electronics unveiled the IntelliVue Clinical Information Portfolio (ICIP) which enable the exchange of patient data or other electronic health records (EHRS) across provider networks. This gives the clinicians easy access and retrieval of information they need to make informed care decisions (Nas, 1996).
Focus of people and Technology in Health care organization The quality of people on a project and their management and organization are very important factors in the success than the equipments they use or the technical approaches they apply. The truth is that enterprise architectures are developed evolved and followed by people. Some arguments like “which notation is right”, “which model is right” and “which paradigm is right” are meaningless if one doesn’t have a feasible strategy for working together effectively.
A perfect enterprise architecture model can be created but it doesn’t matter if the project teams can not or will not take advantage of it. A motivating observation is that enterprise architecture has two organizational structures- An informal one that people use to get things done and a formal one that is documented by organization chart/ developers have ethical skills and knowledge and often work with “go to guys” to get things done in the IT departments (Mukherji, 2002).