Since the SMPH informatics and IT staff Town Hall in late February, the Informatics and IT Collaborative has entered a Validation Phase. The purpose of this phase is to continue to receive feedback and answer questions, and to engage department IT and administrative leadership in validating the informatics and IT assets, work and infrastructure currently in place in each department.
The Validation Phase is within Workstream 1. Overall, this Workstream consists of in-depth planning and validation discussions with all department IT leads about software, hardware, licensing, metrics for success, service line creation, staff, and more. Workstream 1 also entails the planning and development of the Office of Informatics and IT structure and future state, which is an ongoing collaboration with SMPH Human Resources. More information about interim and future state structure will be shared in the future. We will use feedback and data gathered during the Validation Phase to refine current plans so we can share the most up-to-date information.
The goal of the validation meetings described below is to discern and properly account for all appropriate informatics and IT work taking place in each department, ensuring it will be represented in the service lines being planned. This process helps the Office of Informatics and IT learn and understand the work occurring in each department. As a reminder, service lines will not be implemented until sometime in 2024, and they will be implemented gradually and not all at once.
The current Validation Phase has three steps:
- As of last month, each department IT leader in scope for this effort received an Excel workbook that helps them perform an Asset Inventory, documenting the assets and work currently done by their IT team in service to their department. This Asset Inventory was due on Friday, March 31, but can be amended during next steps if needed.
- This will be followed by individual meetings between leaders in the Office of Informatics and IT and each department IT leader to go through their Asset Inventory in detail.
- Lastly, a second validation meeting with each department will include Office of Informatics and IT leaders and each department’s IT leader, chair, and chief administrative officer. We anticipate these will occur between May 15 and June 30.
If you are concerned that your IT leader is not aware of work in your portfolio or worried that it will not be accounted for in a future service line, this is a great time to bring this up to your department IT leader.
The Asset Inventories also allow the Office of Informatics and IT to analyze the data and find patterns among the assets, services provided, and staffing models in each department: Are there numerous licenses of a single software across multiple departments? Is there an extremely important tool in one department that will need to be accommodated? What are the overall server and storage capacities of each department and how much do they differ? This will help find areas for synergy or future discussions as this work moves forward.