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My friend, Ralph, works at St. Elsewhere, which is a pretty big, private hospital in another State. He’s a Doc, not a Suit, so his information is probably a little bit stale as far as information systems is concerned. Here is what Ralph told me last week.

They had a meeting at which the (new) administration of the hospital described the progress on getting the electronic medical record up and running. The hospital bought software from a vendor called Mythic. That software was supposed to be easy to tailor for use by just filling in a few fields and building some templates so the development was pretty much already done.

The project is now about 3 to 5 yrs delayed so there was a bit of explaining to do. The whole thing was to be on-line by 2006 — including the really snazzy pieces that were supposed to streamline access to protocols, provide automated reminders, rationalize antibiotic selection, keep track of allergies, etc. So far there is nothing really useful available yet.

HeadSuit was at the meeting, which is always, according to Ralph, a bad sign. InfoTechExec explained that the system would be up and running in a year or two, things were going well with the development of the software, a new vendor had been added to “help” the internal programmers get the Mythic system configured, and there were going to be rollouts of parts of the system over the next 12 mos.

The clinical staff at St. Elsewhere is pretty docile (according to Ralph) and the meeting was coming to a close when one of the ENT Surgeons, Dr. Nosey, pointed out that there were no financials included in the presentation and asked how much the system was going to cost. Ralph recalls that the original price was US$35 million for the whole thing. There was a good deal of hemming and hawing between HeadSuit and InfoTechExec but they finally admitted that the cost was likely to be somewhat more than originally budgeted. How much?

Turns out that the new estimate was $US100 million! Even Ralph, who is pretty cynical about hospital administrations, was taken aback. That’s 3x the cost that was budgeted. How far along in spending had they gotten, Dr. Nosey wanted to know. Well, neither HeadSuit nor InfoTechExecc could say. Dr. Nosey then asked why the medical staff should have any confidence in the new estimate when the management couldn’t even say how much had been spent to date. There was some back and forth on this but it became clear that the project had already spent US$30 million.

Ouch!