Independent hospitals consolidate IT services

The client

A network of eight independently operating hospitals required assistance with collaboration and consolidation of shared IT services.

The challenge

The hospitals were facing common problems and competing priorities with their respective IT environments. Each hospital sought to reduce costs while improving their end-user satisfaction and provide higher quality of service. The hospitals quickly realized collaboration would be the quickest, and most cost-effective strategy towards IT improvement.

The solution

Our experts conducted an IT assessment for each hospital, including a review of their IT services offerings, staffing and organization structure, governance and budgeting process, policies and procedures, disaster recovery plans, end user computing environment, infrastructure (network, server, storage, backup and telecommunications), network security architecture and data center environment.

We benchmarked each IT environment against industry best practices and identified opportunities for improvement in services and delivery. Ten key shared services were selected for potential collaboration. Additionally, a financial model was developed that allowed individual hospitals to compute their return on investment (ROI). The financial model was also flexible in allowing members to change the primary driver for the services, allow members to join or leave the consortium, and redistribute the costs to the recipients of the service.

The benefit

The IT assessment report, shared services report, and a financial model identified key collaboration opportunities amongst the eight hospitals. By collaborating on their IT services, the hospitals maximized the use of personnel and infrastructure resources. Using the shared services model, each hospital was able to improve their IT service delivery, increase stakeholder satisfaction, and reduce the cost of delivering IT services. The report also identified the transition effort and perceived operational benefit for each entity as a result of the shared service model.