By Joaquim P. Menezes -
I recently recieved an invite for a media tour of the new - and much publicized - Brampton Civic Hospital in Brampton, Ont. – in particular the hospital's William Osler Health Care Centre (WOHC).
"Tour Canada’s most advanced ultra-modern hospital two weeks before it opens to the public," the invitation stated. "Find out how information technology is transforming the future of hospital care."
Making allowances for the PR overkill, the invite still piqued my interest.
I'm quite curious about this new facility that's set to be inaugurated in a couple of weeks.
When completed, the 608-bed facility will be largest hospital site in Ontario (some reports say it represents the largest health care infrastructure project of its kind in Canada).
A very broad range of IT systems providers will be delivering various pieces of the hospital's IT infrastructure.
Very early this year, Siements was awarded a huge contract to deliver a bunch of technologies to the hospital – including MRI, CT, Angio, Nuclear Medicine, Cathlab, Women's Health, Urology, Radiography, RIS and PACS systems.
Likewise, WOHC purchased the complete Picis CareSuite software suite. Picis software will be used to automate all of WOHC's high-acuity areas, including its emergency departments, operating rooms and intensive care units.
These are just two examples – the list goes on and on.
For an initiative of this magnitude, vendor management is likely to be one of the biggest challenges confronting the hospital's IT department and those overseeing the rollout of all these technologies at the facility.
A couple of years ago, I remember a conversation I had with Linda Weaver, chief technology officer at Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA), Ontario about the massive vendor-management issues she confronted and had to resolve.
SSHA was formed to provide a common IT infrastructure and services to Ontario’s many disparate healthcare providers – a mandate that required the Agency to harness technologies from a broad range of vendors.
"We thought that if we made a strong definition of what the vendors were to do, they would all play nice,” Weaver said.
It didn't take long for her to realize this was a very naïve view of the world.
“Rather than being collaborative, it started out as quite combative," Weaver recalled. "When you get six or seven big vendors in the room they all want to outplay everybody else. We literally spent all of our time refereeing, because the systems had to be fully integrated in order to work.”
Weaver had worked on large projects before, though nothing of this size. She soon resolved that SSHA would have to take a tough line with its major vendors.
“We got the whole suite of them in a room and we were very direct with them about what it was we were trying to achieve and what our expectations of them were,” she explained.
“We told them that no vendor was going to be the lead player on this objective. There would be many lead players at any given time, and the work must be done collaboratively. Everyone had to agree to play together and to disclose information on interfaces and other things to each other. We essentially told them, if you don’t want to play, tell us now because we will find somebody else.”
I believe there's a valuable lesson there on the tricky art of vendor management.