Advisory Panel: Decisions Regretted

The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

This question this time: What decision did you or your department make recently that you regret the most?

Actually all recent decisions have been good ones.  It’s the sins of the distant past that are still haunting us.

Letting the hospital put "web filters" to reduce inappropriate web surfing… it has slowed normal internet use to a crawl at times!

We decided to wait until this week to hold an all-IT-employee appreciation event. In retrospect, I wish we had held the event sooner. My team has been working incredibly hard, long hours for quite some time. We need to celebrate, relax, and break bread more often!

There are so many in hindsight of course. Anything with McKesson Horizon. HIStalk ran the rumors for at least a year before the 20/20 announcement. Anyone with experience in vendor mgmt or software development in general would say the Horizon 20/20 announcement was a sign of problems. It was the start of the best and brightest leaving the Horizon project team. It was a declaration that much if not all of your software licensing money spent was wasted, if you move to Paragon you can recoup, but all that time building a solution. All those hours spent and knowledge built will have to be repeated inside of 24-36 months.  It’s a demoralizing thing, in my opinion, when you could see/feel the winds of change but couldn’t get the ship turned. 

I regret holding on to one of my managers for too long.  I tried for three years to get him where he needed to be, including a management geared towards his weaknesses. I found it difficult to provide tangible measurable criteria with which to push him. Regular staff is much easier to measure/document against, but they are more task based. The role of management really has to do with decision making and overall philosophy ,which is difficult to make tangible. I finally replaced him and can’t be happier. The new manager has the same management style/philosophy and has made significant changes since his arrival seven business days ago!

Hiring someone we thought would want to get EpicCare Certification and then be hired somewhere else and did. Jerk.

Not my decision, but I’d say the state’s decision to try to dictate HIE (without understanding it) after everyone had already made plans.

Picking a vendor for an automated claims processing system that had very little experience with the types of claims adjudication rules that we follow. But, our department really didn’t make the decision. The decision to choose the vendor was made by members of the Board of Directors, overruling the recommendation of the CIO and selection committee. True to form, the decision has been a disaster and we are going to throw the vendor out and re-compete the contract.

A trusted current vendor acquired a new system through acquisition. Because we needed what it did, I jumped on it right away. Only later did I come to realize the trusted vendor didn’t have a clue how to integrate it with what they/we had. By itself it works great – a year later they/we are still trying to figure it out.