10. NEXT STEPS

In the first year of our strategic planning for information management, our planning groups developed visions for the future of patient care, education, and research at VUMC. In the second year, we derived a set of projects that would enable those visions, and the planning groups made their recommendations of which projects are most essential to maintain VUMC's quality and competitiveness over time.

This plan should be used in three ways:

• To stimulate further discussion around how our work processes might change.
  

  Because of the visions that were developed in phase one of the process, the plan is based upon the assumption that VUMC will use fundamentally new processes to meet its mission in the future. The hospital's collaborative organization design process, and the Task Force discussions about the new environment, have laid the ground work for that type of change in the patient care arena. Similar discussions are needed in the areas of learning and research before we can move very far with those elements of the plan.

  
  

• As a road map to permit coordination of expenditures on information technology.

  With a coordination strategy, day to day expenditures should meet an immediate business need, while also providing the next step in development of a re-usable infrastructure.

  
  
• To build consensus regarding the relative importance of investing in information technology versus other competing priorities.

  We want to judge the importance of alternative projects against a common vision and embrace collective priorities for implementation.

It is now time to seek broader consensus on the visions, through a process of sharing and discussion.

• We will create a concise communication instrument which will integrate key points from both phases of our planning process for widespread distribution among faculty, staff, and students at VUMC.

• We have produced videos that bring to life scenarios written by two of our domain committees; these will be used in presentations to groups within the Medical Center to communicate aspects of the visions for discussion.

• At the same time, we will start processes to understand more clearly the resource implications of projects recommended for priority -- for example, by estimating the resources required to fund and implement a capital project to provide the additional network-attached desktop computers needed to support the work of all our faculty and staff.

• As the institution agrees on priorities for funding and implementation, we will move into a tactical planning mode for individual projects and for coordination among projects.

• Through involvement in each project, through evaluation of emerging technologies, and in responding to new opportunities, we will gain additional information and experience which will necessitate iterative revision of our strategic plan.

Our goal is to have a strategic plan which is a living document.