ABC health care centre is one of the top health care centres in San Francisco, California that provides medical assistance and health related knowledge to its patients. The health care centre has a total of 27 branches in the country with an overall staff of 350 doctors and 1000 other employees. The health centre excels in providing medical assistance to patients and has been ranked as number 1 health care centre in terms of services by the government organization. On an average, the health care centre serves a total of 5,500 patients in a single month throughout the country. The health care centre is experiencing a growth in its business recently and its manual methods of information storage are becoming obsolete and difficult to manage. Therefore, the management has realized that there is an urgent need to implement a digital system that can resolve the problems of the administration.
Data of the Health Care Centre
ABC health care centre has loads of data to take care of on regular basis. The list of information that is to be stored on the new system is given below:
· Patient details
· Patient medical history
· Appointments
· Inventory
· Financial management
· Human resource management
· Employee information
The new system
The new system appropriate for the ABC health care centre has been identified i.e. an ERP business suite along with a centralized data storage server. ERP business suites are software that integrate various operational modules in one software and manage all the working and operation of an organisation in it. The ERP business suite will help the health care centre to store all the information listed above using a single software. A centralized storage server, along with an ERP business suite, will allow the ABC health care centre to store all the information & data and will allow the employees to access the data from anywhere in the organisation after providing proper authentication on the server. (Stango, 2013)
The advantages of the chosen digital system to the health care system are:
· It will make creating, storage and accessing of data easier.
· It will save the health care organisation a lot of money as it will have to buy only one software to manage all its operation.
· ERP software are flexible and can be tailored according to the need of the company. This will allow the health care organisation to get a professionally developed software that will be in accordance of the health care’s needs.
· ERP software are highly user friendly. This will allow the company to reduce its overall cost of implementation as there will be no requirement for professional staff to operate the new system.
· ERP software are widely used because of their security measure that makes compromising of information and data impossible.
· The employees of the health care centre can undergo training, under hired professionals, to get introduced to the new system and use it on their own later on.
· ERP software will provide the company with the advantage of backing up and restoring important information of data in case of unexpected man-made or natural disasters. (Lahiri Dey, 2013)
The advantages of implementing a centralized system of data storage are:
· Storage and access of data will be made easier.
· Higher security measures could be provided to important information and data related to the health care centre and the patients.
· It will provide efficient ways of backing up and restoring important data so that the health care is not vulnerable to unexpected man-made or natural disasters.
· It will take the company one step closer in providing digital health services to its patients/clients.
Details of the project
The project will be headed by Mr. Martin who is the head of human resource management and IT of the health care centre. The project team will consist of all those related directly or indirectly to the IT department of the company. The project will be under the supervision of the above mentioned people and a total budget of $15,000 will be allocated to the complete project which will include the following:
· System planning and analysis
· Getting the software developed
· Acquisition of the software
· Acquisition of the infrastructure and the required technology
· Implementation of the software in the health care centre
· Training the employees to operate the new system
· System Maintenance
The company will acquire a new software with all its copyrights and licenses so that it can use the software on as many systems it wants to. The acquisition of specially developed software will ensure that the company is safe from crashing of software or other major and minor bugs because an open source software will not be guaranteed by the developer or provider. Therefore, a company like ABC health care centre, with such a good reputation should invest in the best available options and should get a specially developed software, tailored according to its requirements.
The total time allotted for the implementation of the new software in the health care centre will be around 2 months which will include:
· System analysis (15 days)
· Software developing and acquisition (10 days)
· Infrastructure and technology acquisition (10 days)
· Employee training (15 days)
· Controlling and measuring (10 days)
Further, a separate wing will be established within the health care centres which will house the central storage servers and will be under the direct supervision of the senior IT managers.
Once the company has successfully achieved its primary goals, the next stage in the system development will be to provide digital health care services to the patients. Using the centralized storage servers, the management can provide user-ids and passwords to the patients, who will be able to access the data stored on the servers related to their own health. The patients will be able to access important data like medical reports, test reports, x-rays, prescription etc. which will take the services provided by the health care facility to a whole new level and the biggest advantage being that the patients will be able to track their health in more efficient ways which were never possible before.
The maintenance of the system and groundwork will be under the IT wing of the health care facility. They will have to continuously coordinate with the software developer team in case they find some bugs in the software. The software developers will be liable to perform the debugging process and provide regular updates under the guarantee that they will provide to the management. After the total implementation of the desired system, the health care centre will measure the changes in the working process of the administration so that it can compare the before and after efficiency and work quality of the health care centre as a whole.
References
Lahiri Dey, S. (2013, December 6). Benefits of Using ERP System. Retrieved from http://blogs.ramco.com/benefits-of-erp-software
Stango, J. (2013, June 9). A Few Thoughts on ERP in Healthcare. Retrieved from http://www.tribridge.com/knowledge-center/tribridge/posts/p2/2013/06/09/a-few-thoughts-on-erp-in-healthcare
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