In May of this year, President George W. Bush’s administration named David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph.D., Coordinator of the Office of National Health Information Technology. Dr. Brailer and his office were given the responsibility for meeting President Bush’s goal of creating a national electronic health record for most Americans within the next 10 years.

A national electronic health record is expected to improve quality, safety and efficiency and save an estimated $140 billion per year through improved care and reduced duplication of medical tests. President Bush has already proposed $50 million in new grants for next year’s budget to support state and local projects to achieve the goal of exchanging health information.

Additional health information technology initiatives include:
• Bar coding drugs to reduce medication errors
• Improving the nation’s ability to detect outbreaks and bioterrorism
• E-prescribing for Medicare and other health plans
• Providing electronic drug information for health professionals
• Expanding telemedicine programs for remote and rural communities
• Creating clinical decision-making tools
• Developing health information resources for patients and consumers

With all of these initiatives, health information technology departments at hospitals across the United States face an increase in project workloads. Because of the enormity of these projects, management will need to have a solid project management methodology to effectively implement these rapidly-advancing technologies.

Is your hospital being faced with the implementation of multiple large and increasingly complex technologies? If you answered yes, you are not alone. Canadian Hospitals are also experiencing this surge.

A recent study conducted by Canadian Healthcare Technology suggests the success of these systems is dependent upon the project management skills of IT executives and staff. The study surveyed 262 Canadian hospital CIO’s and IT Directors in February and March 2004. It found that:

• 50% of respondents have 1 - 4 major IT projects in process
• 16% have 17 or more major projects underway
• 60% said 1 to 10% of their IT projects failed in the past year
• 21% said 10 to 20% of their projects failed
• 19% reported more than 20% failure rate

Despite these alarming statistics, most hospital CIO’s reported their organizations were not using common project management techniques or progress measures. According to Glen Knight, an expert in healthcare information technology project management, “I believe these findings hold true for U.S. hospitals as well, based upon my experience with healthcare organizations across the country.”

The Canadian study identified the following solutions for managing IT projects.
• Complete a project plan, utilize progressmeasures, project evaluation and a formalized organizational process.
• Provide Project Management training for senior hospital executives which focuses on implementing project management in a hospital setting.

The complete study, “IT Project Management in Canadian Hospitals: Challenges and Responses”, is available from Canadian Healthcare Technology magazine.

Building an Enterprise-level project management system can be broken down into two very distinct parts:
• establishing the business process
• setting up and configuring the technology components.

This column focuses on the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution, commonly known as the MSEPM or Project Server. The MSEPM consists of four front end tools that act as the interfaces to the project portfolio and its associated data:

1. Project Professional, part of the Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Suite, is a tool used by Project Leaders to create, update and track project schedules, budgets, resources and progress.
2. Microsoft Project Server is the central repository for all projects. It also contains the Enterprise Resource Pool and provides tools for project analysis and modeling.
3. Project Web Access is a web application which provides access to project information and workspaces. For example, team members can update task information, submit issues and participate in project discussion groups. Managers and supervisors can view projects their resources are involved with and view reports to aid in forecasting. Executives can see individual and portfolio project status, view reports and resource constraints and utilize tools for forecasting and building future project models.
4. Windows Sharepoint Service (WSS) acts as a project portal creating web browser-accessible workspace for project teams. This enables teams to collaborate using on-line issues lists, discussion forums, calendars and a document library.

The MSEPM integrates a rich set of features for accessing enterprise-wide information about projects and resources, thus enabling organizations to better manage project costs and schedules, improve project team collaboration and allocate resources more efficiently.

In our next issue, we’ll look at a few of the challenges in getting the MSEPM working in your environment. Unlike most Microsoft applications where the hardest part of the installation is making sure you have typed the license key correctly, MSEPM is complex and the choices made during the installation will have a significant impact on how well the MSEPM performs in your environment.

Troy Wheeler, Vice President of Technology, EPM2e, can be reached at 800-878-0385.

Many users of Microsoft Project are frustrated with the standard budget report. It shows the fixed and total costs, but does not report resource costs. You can get resource cost information by defining a new field and modifying the report. Keep in mind that MS Project reports both labor costs and material costs as resource costs. Fixed cost + Resource cost = Total cost. The following steps allow you to add resource costs as a customized field:

1. From the Gantt view, display the Cost Table (Select View/Table/Cost)
2. In the Cost table, right click the Fixed Cost Accrual column heading.
3. Select, Insert Column
4. Change the following fields in the Column Definition dialog box:
     • Field name: Cost1
     • Title: Resource Cost
     • Align Title: Center
     • Align Data: Right
     • Click Best Fit

5. In the Cost table, right click the column heading Resource Cost.
6. Select Customize Fields
7. Make sure Cost1 is highlighted
8. Click the Formula button
9. Select Field/Cost/Cost
10. Click the minus sign button (-)
11. Select Field/Cost/Fixed Cost
12. Click OK/OK/OK
13. Hide the Fixed Cost Accrual column
     • In the Cost table, right click the Fixed Cost Accrual column heading
     • Select Hide Column

14. View the budget report: View/Reports/Costs/Budget

The Budget Report is sorted by cost in descending order. If you would prefer to see this report sorted by task number, follow these steps:

1. Select View/Reports/Costs
2. Highlight the Budget report and click Edit
3. Change the value in the “Sort By” field to ID
4. Change the sort order to Ascending
5. Click OK