| | September 20198CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONThere are areas within every hospital system that are, for the most part, invisible to those who are bustling and managing patients' clinical needs on the front end. It takes every team member to be successful. Hospitals provide critical care, surgical services, complex invasive procedures, and diagnostic testing every day. The public and staff see these services and the value and knowledge of those carrying out each task, but those behind the scenes are contributing just as much to the patient care overall outcome as those who provide direct patient care. The front-line direct care providers have welcomed an incredible amount of technology into these procedures in order to allow them to be safer, more efficient, and hold a greater power for report generation and statistical data collection, thus allowing quantifiable foundations for increasing safety and efficiency yet again.These invisible areas are very self-contained in their management of services ­ as long as everything is going well and functioning as expected. Introduce one suspicion of the word "downtime" and suddenly your Information Technology teams are the most popular experts in the facility. UP Health System recently moved our system's largest hospital to a newly-constructed facility. It required over two years of planning for multiple clinical and non-clinical teams and disciplines to prepare for a short 12-hour window to relocate our entire operation, including critically ill patients and all services. This consisted of reviewing current practices, finding opportunities for improvement, writing plans, testing and practicing for Nursing, Physicians and Clinical Care, Plant Operations and Facilities, Quality and Safety, Educators, Environmental Services, and Accounting/Finance, just to name a few. The list goes on and on from renewal and upgrade of dozens, if not hundreds, of levels of licensing, ordering supplies and medical equipment and coordinating interoperability, and of course, all of the necessary hardware, software, and networks required to make a large healthcare institution functional. While some of the departments in our Level II Trauma Center were able to migrate into their new spaces on or near the actual move date, our Information Technology teams were in the new building over a year in advance. They were required to build, run, and maintain parallel systems in both facilities for months in order to install all computers and equipment, test networks, test resident and web-based programs for functionality and compatibility, and anticipate the needs of about two-thousand people who would converge on their new work space all on the same day and basically all at the same time. While building and testing the systems and placing hardware throughout the new facility, they also had to maintain a mirrored image of the entire production at the original facility where continued care for hundreds of patients on a daily basis By Alyson Sundberg, Director, Risk Management, Compliance and Emergency Services, UP Health System MarquetteI.T. DEPENDENCY REQUIRES RESPONSIBILITY
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