Individual Paper - Work-Related Project Analysis

Define situation:

Hospitalists are physicians who admit patients to the hospital when the particular patients do not have their own physician to admit them or their personal physician does not have privileges at this particular hospital. A group of 8 hospitalists lost their contract with hospital as sole hospitalist group. They will continue to admit patients to hospital for certain physician practices as necessary. Another group of hospitalists, not connected to this original group, will work directly for the hospital providing care to admitted patients.

This first group of hospitalists has to move their offices from the hospital campus to a private location, computer systems need to be set up so that doctor's office personnel have access to hospital systems in order to update hospital systems, and to enable hospital employees access to information changed by the hospitalists due to their examination and treatment of patients who have been admitted to the hospital. In addition to this, the group will be downsizing their group from 14 physicians to 8 and restructuring their partnership agreements with the remaining doctors.

Analyze needs:

The group of physicians will need access to several hospital computer systems to ensure properly documented care. The system to be used to access the CareManager information on the hospital database is called Citrix. This is a virtual application that "establishes a secure, encrypted connection between the client and datacenter to ensure that desktops, applications and other resources are securely accessed from anywhere ("Citrix - Make This Solution Work For You", 1999-2011). The office staff at the new location will have access to the hospitals database by logging into the Citrix system. This application is served by Citrix Xen Server which works by "dynamically adapts to meet all computing demands by powering servers on and off or by adding or removing new virtual machines to a resource pool. ("Citrix - Make This Solution Work For You", 1999-2011. By utilizing this system, the office staff will be able to update patient medical records with current treatment information.

In addition to the hospital database, the office personnel will need to access the Outlook and paging systems at the hospital to ensure reliable communication between the hospitalist's office and hospital personnel. There will need to be communication between the hospital's IT personnel and the office staff to ensure secure access to hospital systems to enable HIPPA regulations to be followed. The office will also need to set up access to their billing company's computer system for updating and data entry.

Interviews will take place between the hospitalist's representative, their office manager, a representative of the hospital's IT department, the billing company rep,