HIS purchase projects in public hospitals of Styria, Austria

The Steiermärkische Krankenanstaltenges. m.b.H (KAGes) is a company, owned by the province of Styria in Austria, which operates 21 hospitals with about 8000 beds and 14000 employees, serving a population of ca. 1.2 million people. KAGes has purchased a new hospital information system (HIS) for its hospitals. Within the strategic IT plan and the 'system structure new' (SSN) project, a methodology was developed for making an effective HIS purchase. Several steps of this project are described in the paper, request for product information, evaluation of vendor proposals, product presentations, test site evaluation, reference site visits and selection of vendor finalists. The authors present the internal project management methodology, including the structure of the project team, project information management through intranet, criteria for different steps of the evaluation and evaluation site organization. Four major HIS vendors with leading HIS products qualified for this stage of the project (evaluation site). About 60 teams with 400 members (end users and IT-experts) have assessed all the products installed, during one or more, repeated test sessions. The decision on which new HIS to purchase were based on the recommendations derived from this evaluation. After completing SSN-project with the suggestion to KAGes-top-management for negotiations with two vendor finalists, the new project named MEDOCS was started mid-1999. Two pilot installations (one general hospital and one teaching hospital department) are nowadays in the pilot implementation and subsequent roll-out (including substitution of the legacy system) is scheduled until the year 2003.