HIS purchase projects in public hospitals of Styria, Austria

The Steiermarkische Krankenanstaltenges. m.b.H (KAGes) is a company, owned by the province of Styria in Austria, which operates 21 hospitals with abou t 8000 beds and 14000 employees, serving a population of ca. 1.2 million pe ople. KAGes has purchased a new hospital information system (HIS) for its h ospitals. Within the strategic IT plan and the 'system structure new' (SSN) project, a methodology was developed for making an effective HIS purchase. Several steps of this project are described in the paper, request for prod uct information, evaluation of vendor proposals, product presentations, tes t site evaluation, reference site visits and selection of vendor finalists. The authors present the internal project management methodology, including the structure of the project team, project information management through intranet, criteria for different steps of the evaluation and evaluation sit e organization. Four major HIS vendors with leading HIS products qualified for this stage of the project (evaluation site). About 60 teams with 400 me mbers (end users and IT-experts) have assessed all the products installed, during one or more, repeated test sessions. The decision on which new HIS t o purchase were based on the recommendations derived from this evaluation. After completing SSN-project with the suggestion to KAGes-top-management fo r negotiations with two vendor finalists, the new project named MEDOCS was started mid-1999. Two pilot installations (one general hospital and one tea ching hospital department) are nowadays in the pilot implementation and sub sequent roll-out (including substitution of the legacy system) is scheduled until the year 2003. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights res erved.