HIM 560 Module 7 Final Project Milestone Three Example

Final Project Milestone Three: Three Proposals, One Choice. Vendor Evaluation for Pelican Shoals Health

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

HIM 560: HIM Informatics and Technology Infrastructure

Final Project Milestone Three

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Final Project Milestone Three: Three Proposals, One Choice. Vendor Evaluation for Pelican Shoals Health

Pelican Shoals Health requested proposals from five organizations and received three. This milestone evaluates them using the requirements and weights agreed in Milestone Two, before any proposal was opened. It describes each option, applies the must requirements as screens, scores the options on six weighted criteria, compares five-year costs, reports what staff learned in scripted tests and what reference sites said and recommends one option with conditions.

The Three Options

Option A comes from the hospital's current inpatient record vendor. It would move the record to the vendor's data center, replace the imaging system with the vendor's own document management module and move the clinics onto its ambulatory module, creating a single record. Option B pairs a specialist document management vendor with a new, supported interface engine; the inpatient and clinic records would remain separate but connected by interfaces, and the inpatient record would move to hosting through a third party. Option C comes from a regional health system based about ninety miles inland, which offers to extend its own enterprise record to Pelican Shoals and its clinics under a shared-instance arrangement, with the hospital paying a share of hosting, support and licensing.

Screening Against Must Requirements

All three options met the must requirements on paper, but with differences. Each offered recovery within four hours and data loss under fifteen minutes from hosting outside the flood zone. Option B met the clinic data requirement only through new interfaces, which the vendor estimated at fourteen months to complete. Option A's document module met the three-second retrieval requirement in testing, as did the other two. No option was eliminated at this stage, although Option B's timeline raised concern.

Weighted Scoring

Six criteria were scored from 1 to 5 by an eight-member evaluation team including health information, nursing, physician, clinic and IT members, with the median of their scores recorded. Table 1 shows the results.

The team disagreed most on usability. Coders favored Option B, whose viewer they found fastest, while nurses and physicians favored Option C for its clinic medication reconciliation. Recording the median rather than an average kept one strongly held view from moving the score, and the disagreement was noted for the implementation plan. A sensitivity check also asked whether reasonable changes to the weights would alter the ranking. Doubling the weight on cost to 30% and reducing functional fit to 10% narrowed Option C's lead but did not reverse it, which gives leaders confidence that the result does not depend on one judgment.

Table 1. Weighted Scores for Three Vendor Proposals

Note. Prepared by the author from evaluation team scores; weights were set before proposals were opened.

Scripted Tests and Usability

Vendors differ sharply in how seriously they practice user-centered design (Ratwani et al., 2015), so demonstrations were not left to vendors' sales teams. Each vendor had to let Pelican Shoals staff complete the same six tasks, such as indexing a scanned consent, releasing a redacted record and finding a clinic medication list for an admitted patient. Coders completed chart review fastest in Option B's document viewer, which explains its higher usability score. Option A's clinic module required nine steps to reconcile an outside medication list, compared with four in Option C. Option C's larger system was harder to navigate at first, but its search and chart review features performed well once staff had brief instruction.

Interoperability and the Wider Network

Option C scored highest on interoperability because it would place Pelican Shoals on the same record used by the regional system, where many of the hospital's transferred patients and specialty referrals already go. Everson and Adler-Milstein (2016) found that hospitals exchanged data more readily with organizations using the same vendor, and a shared instance goes further by placing patients' data in one record. Option A would unify the hospital and clinics but leave exchange with the regional system dependent on external networks. Option B would keep the current division, connected by interfaces that must be maintained.

Five-Year Cost

Five-year costs, including licenses, hosting, implementation, training backfill and internal staff, were estimated at $6.8 million for Option A, $5.8 million for Option B including interfaces and third-party hosting and $7.4 million for Option C. Option C is the most expensive, but it also retires the hospital's interface engine, its imaging system and most on-site servers, and it includes the regional system's recovery site. Cost scores reflect these totals, which is why Option C scored lowest on this criterion despite its advantages elsewhere.

Reference Checks

Two reference calls were held for each option. Option A's references praised hosting reliability but described slow response to clinic module problems. Option B's references were satisfied with the document system but noted that interface work ran long. Option C's references, two small hospitals already on the regional system's record, valued the shared record and the recovery site but warned that local requests for changes wait in a queue with the larger system's priorities.

Recommendation and Conditions

The evaluation recommends Option C. It scores highest on four of six criteria, solves the clinic exchange problem and connects the hospital with the organization to which it already sends many patients. Its recovery site meets the NIST guide's advice to keep backup capacity away from the threats facing the primary site (Swanson et al., 2010). The reference warning about local influence is the main risk. The recommendation therefore depends on three contract conditions: a Pelican Shoals seat on the regional system's record governance committee, a defined response time for local change requests and clear terms for returning the hospital's data in a usable format if the arrangement ends.

Conclusion

Weights set in advance, scripted tests and reference calls give Pelican Shoals leaders a defensible basis for choosing the regional option despite its higher cost. The final project will turn this choice into a technology infrastructure plan covering implementation, staffing, risks and measures of success.

References

Everson, J., & Adler-Milstein, J. (2016). Engagement in hospital health information exchange is associated with vendor marketplace dominance. Health Affairs, 35(7), 1286-1293. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2015.1215

Ratwani, R. M., Fairbanks, R. J., Hettinger, A. Z., & Benda, N. C. (2015). Electronic health record usability: Analysis of the user-centered design processes of eleven electronic health record vendors. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 22(6), 1179-1182. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocv050

Swanson, M., Bowen, P., Phillips, A. W., Gallup, D., & Lynes, D. (2010). Contingency planning guide for federal information systems (NIST Special Publication 800-34, Rev. 1). National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-34r1