Methodist Hospital Case Analysis The Situation When William J. Loveday became the new CEO, most of Methodist Hospital was using a 30-year-old information system. This old system was called TDS, and was a mainframe system with over 500 dumb terminals. The system allowed physicians to order tests and procedures and the results could be reported. Admitting and billing information was captured by the mainframe. Those departments that would not use the current information system had acquired their own systems, were not approved by the information services department, cost the hospital 40 percent of the information technology expenditures, and trapped any data collected because the 713 PCs and minicomputers could not share data. Although TDS was able to share data, it had four drawbacks. It contained no data on outpatients, it …show more content…
The basics of top down communication were there, as exemplified by Moeller, “by the end of the fourth day these people had arrived at a common vision” (Case Study 111-3, p. 441) in communicating a new process to staff. However, there were two problems: stunted interdepartmental and bottom up communication. Employees in separate departments were not interacting effectively, which further siloed departments and meant procedures were not delivered the same way. Lack of interdepartmental communication ultimately causes reduced quality of care for patients (Katcher, 2016). Top down communication is the strategic management model used at Methodist, but its main problem is that the company’s success falls entirely on the executive leaders. We see this when front line staff, or employees providing care, didn’t understand that they should share information with their supervisors. Bottom up communication is when a company uses the ideas of its workforce to accomplish goals (Lister, 2016), like implementing an information