Kicking the Tires on the eAppointment Project

The board of directors has nominated Margaret Scott, an experienced business-savvy project manager, to lead the eAppointment project. It will be her job to bring together business and IT staff from many different departments and with various roles, and have them share information, responsibility, and ownership of the process of making and managing appointments. A “project start architecture” document has been written, outlining the business objectives and information architecture context of the eAppointment project.

Today, Margaret is meeting with Frank Tiger, team leader for the application management and support team in the information department. He and his team take care of the Clinical Information System, a key application for surgical data whose scope was later expanded to also support the medical laboratories. Frank came to St. Matthews in one of the 1990 mergers. Before that he headed data operations in one of the smaller hospitals that was merged with St. Matthews. Over the past two decades, Frank and his team have been nurturing their database with patient data. Starting out as a small scheduling and billing information system used at the surgical care department, it slowly grew into a patient record system used all over St. Matthews. The team now also tracks simple medical patient data such as blood pressure readings, weight, and height. Today, Frank is sitting on the largest pile of patient records in the hospital—with over 300,000 patient records and many tens of millions of associated table rows. His cooperation is critical for the eAppointment project, and Margaret certainly knows that.