8. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRIORITIES

• Process for Developing Recommendations
• Projects Recommended as Priorities for All Domains
• Additional Priority Recommendations by Domain

Each domain committee was asked to make recommendations about the relative priority of each project to its domain. Although each committee used a similar evaluation process, there were enough differences that the results are not strictly comparable. However, they do provide very useful guidance for those who must ultimately make the resource allocation decisions relative to information management projects. The committees were asked by the Information Policy Advisory Committee to consider the following questions for each project:

1. To what extent would it enable us to do new things that we need to do within their specific domain?
2. To what extent would it improve the efficiency or reduce the cost of existing domain-related activities?
3. How quickly could it be implemented at VUMC, culturally?
4. How important is it to VUMC overall -- to maintain quality and competitiveness within their domain?

The process followed by each committee is described briefly below:

Education: The education domain committee evaluated all of the education projects, all of the infrastructure projects, and the subset of the research and patient care projects that they felt were most germane to education and were not parallel to any of the education projects. They met together to discuss each education project and to rate each project on each of the four questions using the School of Medicine's automated audience response system. This system allowed each person to vote anonymously within the group. The patient care and research projects were rated against question 4. This was done individually outside the group. The education, research, and patient care projects were then listed in order of the average vote on question 4. Then, the committee members individually rated the overall importance of each infrastructure project to supporting the higher priority education, research, and patient care projects.

Research: A memorandum was sent to selected representatives of the research community, including the current members of the research domain committee. They were given the same form and instructions as the patient care domain committee, except that they were asked to rate projects' impacts on research at VUMC.

Patient Care: Members of the patient care domain committee received a paper form listing all of the projects and providing blanks for their responses to each of the four questions for each project. They were asked to evaluate the patient care projects using all four questions. They were invited to do the same for the education, research, and infrastructure/support projects, but were told that their response to question 4 was most important for those projects.

In addition, the patient care domain worked with the directors of the Hospital and the Clinic to get additional input from their line organizations. We received direct input on project priorities from managers and supervisors through a survey distributed by the office of the Director of the Vanderbilt Hospital to all department heads and functional supervisors. Respondents were asked which of the projects which would be most beneficial to their operations and to explain the benefit. They were also asked to identify any significant information management needs that did not appear to be addressed in the project list. In the Clinic, a similar request was distributed to practice managers. They then met with the Director of the Clinic to develop a consolidated priority recommendation.

This process allowed us to identify two key sets of projects:
First, there is a set of projects which appear to be important to all three domains. These projects are expected to have a positive impact across all of VUMC's mission areas.

Second, other projects were considered important within a particular domain. While these projects are currently the special interest of one or two domain committees, they may prove to have significant value across all domains. The recommendations presented in the tables are based on ratings of the overall importance of the project to maintaining quality and competitiveness within the domain.