The Merger Of Stanford Hospital And Clinics

Stanford Hospital and Clinics (SHC), like many other Healthcare organizations in 2005, was faced with the challenge to convert to an Electronic Medical Record and ancillary systems. And while this decision was dictated to them through an Executive Order from the President of the United States, there are many steps an organization has to take to ensure that this type of undertaking is fully implemented and completely adopted. Since the total costs of an EMR can range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the success rate is hovering around 50%, it’s obvious to see that SHC had to take into account many things before getting the approval of the Board of Directors. Additionally, companies must ensure that the EMR’s they implement are satisfying

Since the driving factors of the EMR implementation were based in efficiency and quality, many of the previous failures of individual projects gave SHC the wisdom it needed to select the right approach in regards to overall implementation strategy. For example, the capital expenditures during the merger with UCSF left the IT infrastructure woefully neglected. It would require $60M and two years’ worth of effort to get it to a point that it would even support an EMR. Similarly, the proliferation of niche systems throughout the various departments of SHC made it very difficult to integrate and share patient specific information. This caused the Providers to have to access multiple systems to get a complete picture of a patient’s medical history. And lastly, due to the complex and research-based culture of SHC, there was a lack of standardization within their order sets. This led to inconsistent and inefficient use of medical treatments and supplies. Because of these decisions it was clear that the problems of not having an enterprise wide, fully integrated EMR system was holding SHC

SHC followed a common vendor selection path of executing an extensive planning process, involving all affected departments, and then develop the selection criteria they wish to use. These practices drive the identification of key goals, thus allowing the company to select an EMR that supports these goals (HealthIT.gov, 2013). The key point in what they did was the inclusion of all departments into the evaluation criteria. This way all the affected parties would have input into their needs for the solution. However, there are companies that specialize in Vendor evaluation and industry ranking such as Forrester and Gartner. While SHC did utilize the services of KLAS (a ranking service specific to EMRs), having multiple third-party recommendations is now the norm for a project of this caliber. These companies can also assist in RFP development, which could have ensured that SHC didn’t miss anything in their evaluation of the eventual respondents. Ultimately, SHC chose three companies to evaluate that they had intimate knowledge of which is good, but if there were other vendors out there that they just didn’t know about, then a better alternative might have existed that was missed. Most large companies utilize these services for this very