This case history of Methodist Hospital of Indiana and its attempt to create an Information Services department that would meet its complex needs demonstrates that even when a process does not go as smoothly as planned it can still - with a good organizational basis and enlightened management - succeed. The implementation of a new computer system that linked the hospital's departments, workers and patients suffered a number of setbacks that cost the hospital in terms of both time and money. However, the fact that the hospital's administrators had a clear sense of the hospital's mission and maintained firm control over the implementation of the new system produced a generally successful result.
At the beginning of this case study, the hospital's communication system was deeply inadequate, with a number of different competing systems that could not communicate with each other and a staff that was divided rather than united by its communication technologies. The mainframe and local area network systems created significant bottlenecks in the system, required numerous wasted hours of staff effort and reduced the quality of patient care in numerous ways. By the end of the implementation of the system, the newly networked system allowed better use of the faculty's highly skilled staff, allowed medical staff far faster access to needed information (such as lab results) and helped to reassure patients that their needs were of primary concern.
The description of the IS department at this hospital provides an excellent sense of how complicated the process of communication can be in a large organization - even among those who are in fact anxious to communicate with each other. The most important step that Walter Zerrenner (the chief information officer) took in correcting the problems that he found when he joined the hospital was not a technical one but was a psychological one: Without clearly articulated goals the hospital
...