5 Universal Healthcare Project Goals via CIO Will Weider

One of my favorite early blogging compatriots is Will Weider, CIO at PeaceHealth.  While it seems like Will has largely moved his blog sharing to Twitter, he’s still one of the great healthcare CIOs to follow.  A great example of this was a recent Twitter thread he shared around project goals:

Project goals, a thread…
Recently I worked with a group to develop goals around a large project. I realized that these could apply to a lot of projects with little change. So, here are those 5 project goals:

— Will Weider (@CandidCIO) September 14, 2020

And then he shared the following 5 project goals:

Operational Excellence

First and foremost, seek to improve efficiency (work is completed with less human and financial resources) and effectiveness (work is completed more quickly and more accurately). The remaining goals are principles by which we achieve this primary directive

Standardization

Develop and implement standard data and process flows.

Feature Maximization and 3rd Party Elimination

Unless operations will be impaired, we will fully leverage this platform and maximize it’s potential for our organization to achieve return on investment. We will choose integrated capabilities over niche products.

Customer-friendly

Experience Provide us with a system that is easy to use; requires minimal training; and allows us to act immediately on their needs. Create workflows that are respectful of our time; keep us informed; and minimize wait time.

Business Insights

Not only will we have more information needed for decision making and to guide our actions, that information will be embedded into the workflows, so it is available at the point it is needed with less effort to access.

There’s something really powerful about the universality of these project goals, because he’s right that you could apply these same 5 goals to a lot of different projects.  If we achieved all of these goals in our health IT projects, we’d be in a much better place than we are today.

What do you think of these project goals?  Are they really universal?  Is there value in having some universal project goals for all of your health IT projects?  Plus, are there any universal project goals that aren’t on Will’s list that should be added?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.  I’m sure Will Weider would love your thoughts and feedback as well.