Systems Planning and Procurement

Information systems are the backbone of hospital operations.  If they are not operating efficiently and in full support of your organization’s mission, you are losing time, money, and competitive advantage.  In order to establish and sustain effective information systems operations, you have to manage them as one of your most valuable strategic assets.  Your portfolio of systems and IT infrastructure must be assessed and adjusted regularly to maximize efficiency and plan for demands of the future.  Strategic systems optimization requires a wide range of technical, logistical, and business considerations many of which may be unfamiliar to your corporate staff.  One of the biggest challenges is that system optimization never stands still.

Quality’s Strategic Systems Services

At Quality Healthcare Partners (Quality), our strategic systems professionals have developed and implemented strategies to improve the effectiveness of information systems for a wide range of healthcare organizations.  With respect to systems planning, Quality offers the following types of services:

  • Performing multi-dimensional assessments of IT assets and organizations
  • Developing information systems improvement plans
  • Identifying information system opportunities that yield competitive advantages
  • Assessing/preparing capital and operational budgets for IT organizations

Quality’s systems selection and competitive procurement services include:

  • Developing system requirements and operational concepts for new systems
  • Reviewing vendor offerings to identify and recommend pertinent vendor solutions
  • Assessing opportunity for integration into other systems and the current infrastructure
  • Conducting costs/benefits analyses
  • Preparing acquisition documents for competitive solicitations including requests for proposals (RFPs), requests for quotes (RFQs), proposal preparation instructions, cost proposal preparation instructions, proposal evaluation criteria, and other procurement related materials
  • Conducting bidders’ conferences
  • Assisting clients with evaluating vendor proposals
  • Performing vendor reference checks and, when appropriate, accompanying clients during visits to vendor sites
  • Assisting clients with contract negotiations and rendering an acceptance notification
  • Vendor management and project oversight

Quality can assist your IT or project management organization (PMO) in the implementation and support of mission-critical systems by offering the following services:

  • Providing the industry’s finest project managers who are experienced in managing projects of similar size, scope, and technical complexity.
  • Staffing your implementation team with top-notch implementation consultants who are experienced with the solutions being developed and are knowledgeable of the technologies required to implement each solution successfully.

Quality’s Credentials and Client Experiences

Quality’s strategic systems consultants are seasoned veterans of healthcare systems development and operational support.  They are dedicated to fostering success for our clients.

The following describes a few examples of Quality’s extensive experience in planning and implementing strategic systems throughout the U.S. and the world:

  • For a prominent healthcare system consisting of hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities in nine states, Quality directed the implementation of the organization’s strategic technology plan. The program consisted of 35 major projects to be completed over a three-year period with the objective of modernizing networks, computing platforms, and operational procedures.  As the result of this strategic program, the client operationalized such improvements as systems virtualization, hardware/software standards, the upgrading of legacy configurations to a new enterprise-wide network infrastructure, and the consolidation of the individual server centers into a single, more cost-effective corporate data center.  While helping this client make technical architecture decisions, Quality also introduced standards, procedures, and best practices that improved the organization’s effectiveness in project management and IT operations.
  • For an international faith-based organization that supports mission hospitals in third-world countries, Quality provided strategic planning, competitive solicitations of internationally developed solutions, and on-site leadership in transforming individual hospitals and clinics from largely paper-based operations to more productive digital operations.
  • For a specialty organization, Quality provided the senior leadership during the strategic implementation of a new enterprise architecture. The purpose of this effort was to develop a simple, coherent technology baseline to replace the eight million plus lines of code and the flat-file databases written in over 20 programming languages.  In this role, Quality formulated the architecture vision, led the design of the technical infrastructure, established a consensus among management and IT professionals, developed a detailed migration plan, reorganized and directed the systems engineering architecture group, and begun the process of replacing legacy systems with a component-based architecture.  A key element of this architecture is an enterprise data warehouse which consolidates into a single architecture all customer reporting and internal business intelligence analysis.
  • For a long-term care facility in Hawaii, Quality developed a strategy, detailed implementation plan, and budget for migrating the IT architecture to a redundant, fail-over system architecture that provides for rapid recovery from a wide range of disruptive events.

Benefits to Your Organization

Quality’s strategic systems services ensure that our clients obtain the best performances from their information systems and their IT human resources.  Quality works with many of the major software vendors in the healthcare market-space and knows how to implement their solutions in the most cost-effective manner possible.