Hospital CIO says no to bigger IT budget

The chief information officer of one of Ireland’s largest academic hospitals has told its board that the IT department does not need any additional funding and will be able to cut its overall budget by £500,000 this year.

Martin McCormack, CIO of Beaumont Hospital, has said his department does not need to increase its €5m budget after using a new framework to assess the worth of IT investments.

The hospital has been using the IT Capability Maturity Framework launched by the Innovation Value Institute at the National University of Ireland earlier this year.

This is similar to the maturity models developed by consultancies, suppliers and England’s IT agency, NHS Connecting for Health. In all cases, the idea is to enable organisations to determine how mature their technology infrastructure is.

McCormack told E-Health Insider: “There are a number of frameworks in relation to structure but I’d never seen one that is focused on business value to such an extent.

"Before, we had no way of benchmarking against other hospitals or industry in relation to solutions delivery or business planning, so we didn’t know if we were up to scratch.

“We can now benchmark ourselves against the best of what’s out there in the world and bring it into the hospital.”

The framework assigns a score of 1-5 to different aspects of infrastructure, so CIOs can see business values and benefits realisation.

“We wanted a repeatable process that can be measured, so that when we get a project mandate we can try to look at value to hospital, time to treat, cost factors etc. I came from a business background myself and acutely aware of what can go wrong and the importance of best practice,” McCormack added.

Despite working at the trust for only seven months, McCormack said that he sat down with the board at the beginning of the year and told them that an increase in the IT budget was not necessary.

“I detailed what we needed to do this year and said that we do not need any more money to do it. So far, I’ve spent half a million less than last year, so by the end of the year I’m expecting that we will have spent one million less. My budget is £5m and by just doing things differently we don’t need to increase it.”

McCormack said through the framework he established that a number of the smaller, innovative projects achieved a particularly large return on investment.

“We developed an electronic patient record for patients with cystic fibrosis," he said as an example. 

"Although I’m not sure if it could be transported out of organisation, it cost €3,000 and has research element, patient information, orders and results. Its there 24/7 to provide information about the care pathway.” The application is believed to have saved the hospital €200,000.

The framework has also enabled thehopsital to prove it was legible for early involvement in Ireland’s national PACS programme, which is being delivered by McKesson.

McCormack said: “We had to compete for participation and had to prove that technically competent and could deal with business and we were able to use the framework to do that.”

Despite saying ‘no’ to an increased budget the trust is looking to implement PACS, a Microsoft Exchange environment, cardiology system, bed management system, its core hospital implementation system and virtualise its servers under this year’s IT plans.

In giving advice to trusts that may be struggling financially, McCormack said: “Values are what we perceive, benefits are what we receive. If you are trying to make a serious investment, don’t try to manage IT, manage the value of IT.”