Merging cultures is seldom easy.
That’s why the UNMC Health Informatics Program was thrilled to receive a competitive, two-year Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) Planning Grant from the National Library of Medicine to explore the information cultures of UNMC and The Nebraska Medical Center, its clinical partner.
The $280,000 grant is intended to help academic health centers build organizational structures to better manage information and bridge the cultural chasm between academic and clinical information systems.
“The grant will help us work toward a more seamless information infrastructure,” said Nancy Woelfl, Ph.D., director of the McGoogan Library and co-principal investigator of the grant with James Campbell, M.D., professor of internal medicine. “This takes us a long way toward breaking down information silos that nobody intended to build but are just part of the organizational legacy.”
The grant supports development of a plan for an enterprise-wide information management structure. The IAIMS concept emphasizes delivery of context-appropriate information to the point of use, allowing a health care provider, for example, to click a journal article or clinical guideline from within a patient record or an order set. Although there are differences, Dr. Woelfl said, the objectives of the IAIMS grant complement the Capgemini planning process in the hospital.
John Windle, M.D., professor and head of the health informatics program, is principal investigator on the project titled, “Advancing Academic and Community Practices through IAIMS.” He also leads the committee, represented by UNMC and The Nebraska Medical Center, which invested hundreds of hours into the grant application. Based on the planning grant, the group will be eligible to apply for an implementation grant, which could provide up to four years of funding.
“The IAIMS grant is a major boost to our health informatics program,” Dr. Windle said. “It gives us national exposure as a leader in informatics.
“The Nebraska Medical Center has made great strides in integrating the medical staff (private and academic physicians), but we believe these two groups may have different information management needs,” Dr. Windle said. “They may need or want different resources from the library or have different ways of rounding on patients. To a certain extent the hospital is a microcosm of what is happening nationally. This grant will help us explore how the information management needs are similar or different between provider groups.”
UNMC benchmarks well against industry leaders in the use of computerized record technology to support patient care, Dr. Woelfl said. “Through IAIMS, we have an opportunity to explore use of the patient information system as a clinician portal, to customize that portal for different user groups, and use it as a vehicle for many information services, including the library. The library has always served its academic and research community well and we welcome this chance to focus on the information needs of our patient care providers.”
Said Donadea Rasmussen, project manager for the IAIMS grant, “We have clinical and information systems experts who can improve the implementation and adoption of health information technology. However, grant reviewers said if we can successfully address the issues of ‘diversity in expectations about information services among user groups, cultural issues related to the merger of two hospitals, and disconnects and fragmentation in communication about information systems,’ we could be a model for the country.”