Intermountain Healthcare provides healthcare services to patients in Utah and southeastern Idaho. Intermountain operates a network of 21 hospitals with over 2,300 staffed hospital beds. In 2008, Intermountain admitted 130,000 patients and delivered 33,000 babies. In addition to hospitals, Intermountain operates more than 150 clinics. The nonprofit organization employs more than 30,000 people.
Intermountain has developed numerous innovative information systems. A few examples are shown in Figure 2-28. Intermountain provides free private Web pages that patients or family members can create to communicate patient care and health matters to one another. It also provides a facility by which family and friends can send emails to patients that are received by volunteer staff members, printed, and delivered to patients in their rooms.
Additionally, the Intermountain site includes a Web-based portal that patients use to view test results, make appointments, view medical records, and conduct other healthcare matters. Although not shown in this figure, Intermountain also provides a Web nursery that features photos of babies recently born in the hospital. In 2008, Intermountain converted its existing content management system to Microsoft SharePoint for both its public and employee sites.
It uses SharePoint to publish traditional business documents such as announcements, policies, forms, pay schedules, and the like. It also has consolidated business reports under a SharePoint umbrella so that employees have one place to go to find and produce reports that they want. The result is reduced costs and better information for employees. As you'll learn in Chapter 7, these are standard information system applications. Using SharePoint to deliver them saves Intermountain money and it helps employees find documents and other information resources more quickly. But these uses are not particularly innovative.
What is innovative is the way that Intermountain uses SharePoint to enable employees to self-publish within the organization. Employees who have developed new procedures or techniques or new ways of solving problems can describe them on SharePoint sites. They had been attempting to facilitate such publication prior to SharePoint, but according to Ryan Smith, Assistant Vice-President of at Intermountain: The content contribution process was really cumbersome. What should have taken 1 or 2 mouse-clicks took 15 to 20. It often took up to 30 minutes to post a simple piece of content.
If users weren't frequent contributors, they got lost in the process, and the Internal team had to get involved, which constituted a support burden. Because of the difficulty of submitting content, only about 200 of 28,000 employees were active contributors. Intermountain wanted to use SharePoint to enable many more employees to contribute content. Accordingly, as stated by Jeff Johnson, Director of Internal eBusiness, "We made it easy for users to create Team Spaces where teams could collaborate on documents, share calendars, and perform other collaboration functions.
Users really gravitated to these Team Spaces, which they could auto provision without IT assistance." In a short time, Intermountain had more than a thousand team spaces, all supported by a single part time employee. The introductory team space page. Johnson states that Intermountain did not hold any formal user training to help users create and use Team Spaces. Instead, it created a short video that walked the users through the process.
As a result, nurses, administrative assistants, and other staff can create a Team Space in minutes. Johnson summed up the benefits of easy content contribution as follows: "Because it's so much easier to post content in SharePoint, thousands of employees can contribute. The more people that contribute, the smarter we become as an organization."
Questions
1. Consider the applications illustrated in Figure 2-28. For each, explain:
a. Whether you think the application will likely result in cost savings. Explain why or why not.
b. Describe the benefits provided by the application. Consider benefits both to the patient and his or her family as well as benefits to Intermountain.
c. An important political goal in the United States today is to "reduce health care costs." Explain how you think the Intermountain systems illustrated in contribute to that goal.
2. The case indicates that using the prior system, it would take up to 30 minutes to post a single piece of content. Suppose the new system reduced that to 10 minutes, a 20-minute saving. If each of the 200 contributors posted one item per day, what is the total annual cost savings provided by the new system?
Make and justify assumptions about the number of days employees work as well as their likely cost, including salary and benefits. What would have been the savings if 1,000 employees had been contributing content?
3. When analysts compute the cost of an information system, they seldom include the costs of the employee labor for using that system. What does your answer to question 2 tell you about the hidden labor costs of a poorly designed information system?
4. According to the case, SharePoint made it vastly easier for users to contribute content, to the extent that more than a thousand Team Spaces were created in a few months.
The case implies that this development is quite positive. Do you agree? Why or why not? Summarize the advantages and disadvantages of having so many employees involved in creating content. What, if anything, can Intermountain do to increase the advantages or decrease the disadvantages?
5. Reflect on Johnson's statement, "The more people that can contribute, the smarter we become as an organization." State in your own words what you think he means. What does it mean for an organization to be smarter? Is it possible for an organization to be overwhelmed with employee contributions? What factors limit employee contributions to those that are actually useful? On balance do you agree with his statement? Why or why not?