Too Far Ahead of the IT Curve
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Peachtree Healthcare (PH)’s mission are ensures quality, provide consistency and continuity of care across the entire network, to deliver care with the highest levels of efficiency and economy, and maintain respect for patients and staff. The objective of PH is to offer all kinds of treatments so patients' care would be continued without any disruption.
PH’s patchwork IT infrastructure is in critical condition, so it has major IT infrastructure problems. CEO of PH Max Berndt is trying to find the right solution. He has an option to go with monolithic system that will provide consistency across PH’s facilities but may not give doctors enough flexibility or he can choose service-oriented architecture (SOA), a modular design that will allow PH to standardize incrementally and selectively but poses certain risks as a newer technology.
Evaluating pros and cons of both SOA and monolithic system, SOA seems less expensive in the long run than the monolithic system. CEO Max Berndt does not like the basic force to make homogeneous across the network hospitals, especially for non-routine stuff. So, he considers applying SOA as a new information system. Monte Ford, Sr. VP/CIO of American Airlines, recommends SOA and mentioned as “the company doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for a lot more certainty; its infrastructure needs a solutions now”. Likewise Randy Heffner, a VP at Forrester Research also recommends SOA. The interesting thing to note is that none of the experts recommend a monolithic system on case commentary. It is recommended PH to apply SOA because of low costs, easy to use, flexible and low time consuming.
CURRENT SITUATION
Peachtree Healthcare (PH) is a network of eleven large and midsize institutions and has 4,000 employed and affiliated physicians who treated every imaginable injury and disease to one million patients range from new born to nonagenarian with all races, ethnicities, lifestyles