3. A Project to Automate the
Patient Medical Record

3.1 Project Context: Identifying a Project

The management of an organization cares about projects in so far as how they benefit the organization, advancing organizational objectives. For example, for a healthcare organization, these organizational objectives might be to provide quality medical care for its patients at an affordable cost, to follow healthcare industry and government standards and regulations, and to increase healthcare employee and patient satisfaction with the healthcare organization.

Potential projects are developed by looking at the way the organization currently functions and determining changes in the way it functions that would promote the organizational objectives (see figure 3.1). For example, within the healthcare organization, it might have been observed that paper medical records are often unavailable or incomplete, adversely impacting patient care.

It seems clear that a project to “automate the patient medical record” would promote the organizational objective of improvement of patient care by providing a complete and always-available patient medical record within the healthcare organization.

A potential project is identified by stating a project mission. A project mission is a summary of the change to the organization expected to be produced by the project. The mission of the project in this book is to “improve patient care in the HMO through automation of the patient medical record”.

In general, when a project mission is stated, it should not include a solution. A solution is one of many different alternative ways of accomplishing all or part of the change. As Tom Glib states in the book Principles of Software Engineering Management, “Solutions are never holy; they can and should be changed in the light of new requirements, conflicts with other solutions, or negative practical experience with them” [1]. For example, a less solutions-based project mission might be to “improve patient care by creating a complete, always-available patient medical record within the healthcare organization”, which might allow for some interim, non-automated solutions.

However, in this case, management considers that the solution “automation the patient medical record” to be an integral part of having a complete, always-available medical record, and they also foresee that automation of the patient medical record could provide other benefits that improve patient care, including electronic ordering and checking for medication errors.

In this book, the healthcare organization in which the patient medical record is to be automated is a large HMO, which has many hospitals and medical office buildings throughout the nation. The HMO is administered both from a single national location and at various regional locations. Upper management are management physicians who administer the HMO.

References

[1] Tom Gilb, Principles of Software Engineering Management, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988, p. 56.

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