IT Roadmap Provides Path to Operational Excellence
Background
One of Florida’s highest-rated hospitals, according to U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals 2014-15, Tampa General Hospital (TGH) is a private not-for-profit hospital and one of the most comprehensive medical facilities in west central Florida, serving a dozen counties with a population in excess of 4 million. As one of the largest hospitals in Florida, TGH is licensed for 1,011 beds, and is the primary teaching affiliate of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. TGH is a service provider to USF Health, a 450-physician enterprise (practice) of specialists that provide ambulatory care, hospital care and teaching. TGH employs roughly 7,000 employees (IT department is 250 FTEs). Annual revenue is trending at $1.2 billion. TGH has earned HIMSS Stage 7 (inpatient) EMRAM medical records adoption, Magnet status for nursing, and Most Wired recognition five consecutive years.
“Huntzinger really partnered well with our team to push us where we needed a push. It was refreshing to work with a partner that was direct, honest and truthful about our condition (to include the recommendations for remediation), rather than to tell us what we want to hear to secure the next contract. We rely on the hard truth to make things better.”
Scott Arnold | Senior VP & CIO | Tampa General Hospital
Opportunities & Challenges
An unsustainable number of outages of critical systems had occurred for a variety of reasons. In many cases, the outages were avoidable with solid processes, standards, architecture and competencies. The reputation of TGH IT suffered throughout the organization as a result of these issues. IT needed its team looking ahead and getting out of firefighting mode to develop a sustained reputation for operational excellence.
Huntzinger Engagement
Tampa engaged Huntzinger to conduct an overall IT Infrastructure Assessment with a focus on operational excellence and high availability of Tier 1 systems. Specifically, the assessment focused on observations and recommendation to provide IT operational excellence and greater than 99.9% availability of Tier 1 IT systems. The engagement concluded with the development of a 30, 60, 90-day actionable roadmap to obtain TGH’s goals. Huntzinger presented the overall findings and recommendations to the entire IT staff where it was well received.
Outcomes
TGH is currently implementing recommendations from Huntzinger’s Infrastructure Assessment. Through the restructuring of teams and the implementation of improved processes, TGH is steadily transitioning toward operational excellence. A significant reorganization of its Technical Infrastructure department includes a dedicated server team created through internal promotions and external hires, resulting in a team that can proactively respond to issues. With the addition of the server team, TGH is enhancing its monitoring and response capabilities, moving from a mostly reactive environment, to one that delivers insights into issues and events before they occur.
Additionally, TGH is developing long-term infrastructure strategies, such as moving more than 50% of its environment to a virtual desktop infrastructure. This will allow TGH to reduce its desktop support costs by extending the life of its computing devices while simplifying the desktop support process. The result will be higher end-user satisfaction and more time spent on patient care, versus logging in and out of PCs.
The added transparency of these efforts has led to cultural buy-in from the teams who are closely monitoring progress against the roadmap. The structured approach to implementing change has enabled TGH to provide strategic technology leadership while continuing to implement the changes needed to obtain its objectives.
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