My team and I are looking for any existing frameworks to assist in triaging clinical ICT requests for work. We currently have a very unstructured queue of work requests and we are looking to triage these requests more efficiently, especially from a clinical user stand point. We are looking to ensure that the most urgent requests are able to be brought to the front of the queue in a systematic, equitable and transparent manner.
Does anyone out there have anything they have developed and is working well that we can beg, borrow or steal?
Ohhhh the value of a good triage in clinical practise! Risk matrix has to form part of this but an initial brainstorm - enabling model of care change, enabling strategic/annual planning priorities, improving clinical outcome, improving quality of care and cost saving (business hygiene all the freeing up clinical times) are all things that would need consideration to weightings…
Thanks Alex for starting off the discussion. I agree that risk will be an important part of this. Your other suggestions are definitely good starters for ten. Thanks again.
Hi Karen, thanks for raising this!!
At CDHB we don’t have anything formal, but I think about it often as we also have a rather unwieldy queue of work with regards to requests for new/modified clinical decision support in our ePrescribing software, MedChart.
Our IT department uses Cherwell for logging their jobs which does have a matrix that incorporates clinical need as part of the priority matrix, but unfortunatly I don’t have alot of visibility over that.
For our CDS work I can sort our queue based on high, medium, low priority, but the setting of these priotires is curently manual and therefore pretty subjective.
I’ll be interested in how this progresses with input from others.
At the Trust I was at in the UK (University Hospitals Birmingham NHSFT) I was rather shocked that they managed this with a spreadsheet which was controlled by the chief project manager. Yes, with an IT department of 400 bodies they used an Excel spreadsheet for this. On someone’s network folder.
This spreadsheet was regularly reviewed by a team including the CIO, deputy CIO, director and deputy director of clinical informatics, and the chief project manager. That was the good bit.
The bad bit was that it wasn’t effectively shared with wider teams, the assessments and decisions were based on very limited information, and the sheer number of projects was overwhelming. They were looking at ways to overhaul this workflow as it was struggling; in particular small but worthy projects tended to get overlooked and overshadowed by the big ticket items.
Thank you @oliviaclendon and @NathanK
We too are using Cherwell and have the same issues you mention. These issues are well summarised by you both in that we have an overwhelming number of projects that are often inadequately categorised and the small but worthy get lost in queue that includes everything from service desk to big projects.
An excel spreadsheet is definitely not the way to go but I take the point that regular review is definitely something to build in.
I’ve created clinical triage with massive success (reduced wait, streamlined integrated process) using similar with weighted scores before. I’m sure something will emerge from overseas but in the meantime a good discussion is ensuing!
Karen we are talking today about hardware requests which I can assume is covered in this too?
Thanks for asking, Graydon! It seems that this is the case for most of our organisations ICT requests. It would be great to have a system that we could all use, as it seems to be a national problem. We would of course have different regional and local priorities, but a common decision framework and governance framework for managing (clinical) ICT requests would be of tremendous value.
Thanks @NathanK and @Graydon , it does seem that lots of folks are having the same issue. @alex has nominated me to talk about this at the next meeting (thanks @alex) but in the meantime, anyone interested in working together on this please let me know.
Hi All,
If I understand this correctly, you are looking for a framework and NOT a tool to automate the process of prioritising/triaging these requests, right?
I came across this article in the Emerging Tech Yammer and thought it was relevant for this; however, it is about Robotic Process Automation, unsure if that helps.
There’s a few NZ companies doing RPA, Aportio being the one I know the most (CEO/Founder is an acquaintance/former boss).
) but in the meantime, anyone interested in working together on this please let me know.