"Demand Management" and Clinical Laboratory IT Projects

There is an interesting post over at HealthTechnica by Shawn Riley entitled Top 10 Priorites for Health Care CIOs in 2009. Among the ten priorities listed is one that caught my eye: Implement Demand Management. Here is the description of this goal for establishing healthcare projects (boldface emphasis mine):

The most common thing I hear from CIOs and CTOs throughout the medical field is simple:  “We are over burdened with demand.”  Basically, as the HIT field has burst out of its infancy and is finally starting to learn to walk, we have discovered a simple truth, there is infinite demand and we have finite resources.   If you intend on trying to serve your customer and still keep you staff from revolting against you, you must come up with a demand management system that can create an efficient way to adopt the most valuable projects for your organization, optimally use your staffing resources, and communicate effectively with all of your customers (both those that get projects approved, and those that don’t).

I agree with Shawn's suggestions for healthcare CIOs and would also suggest that his list has relevance for pathology departments and LIS projects. Unfortunately, he does not provide any guidance for the criteria to use to earmark "valuable" projects. Let me take a crack at drafting some criteria that might be useful in distinguishing valuable (i.e., successful) projects from the others.

Please keep in mind before reading my list that most pathology informatics personnel will probably spend about 80% of their time maintaining their legacy LIS systems. So remember that all new lab IT projects need to be wedged into the remaining 20% of available time and must be carefully chosen. So here we go with a list of our criteria:

• Any new project must provide a major contribution to patient safety and the efficiency/effectiveness of the clinical lab and pathology operations. The "cool" factor is insufficient in and of itself to justify any new project. Efficiency can be defined as doing things right and effectiveness as doing the right things.
• Any new project must be "doable", which is to say that the goals of the project are attainable in the stated time with the available resources.
• Any new project must be accompanied by a clear plan describing what is to be achieved. The project must then be managed in a way that ensures success and avoids scope-creep.
• Ideally, departmental division and laboratory directors in pathology should be provided the opportunity to review new IT projects. This will help to achieve balance and avoid jealousy that individual divisions or labs are being favored.
• Ideally, new projects should involve the participation of vendor personnel. Such participation should be at little or no cost other than the contribution of local personnel. This guarantees that the vendor places value on the new software and that it will be of interest to other clients.