HI540 Unit 2 Project Charter Example

Three Conditions That End the Work: A Unit 2 Project Charter for a Perioperative Information System Rollout Across Three Hospitals

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HI540: Project Management of Health Information Systems

Unit 2 Project Charter

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Ashby Valley Health, its people and every figure are composite; the sources cited are real.

Header

Project: Perioperative Information System Rollout. Sponsor: Vice President, Surgical Services. Project manager: Senior Informatics Project Manager, Clinical Informatics. Charter version: 1.0, for signature.

Problem Statement

Ashby Valley Health's operating rooms run on a standalone scheduling product whose vendor ends support in fourteen months, while intraoperative documentation and implant use are recorded on paper. Auditors sampling implant lines found 3.1 percent never billed, an estimated $1.6 million a year at current volume, and scanned intraoperative records take 26 hours on average to appear in the chart. This project replaces the scheduling product and the paper process with the perioperative module of the enterprise record, so that cases are scheduled, documented and charged in one system.

Objectives

1. Capture every implant at the point of use by barcode scan into the intraoperative record.

2. Document all intraoperative nursing care electronically in real time.

3. Retire the standalone scheduling product before its support ends.

Scope

In scope:

1. Surgical case scheduling for all 26 operating rooms at the three hospitals.

2. Intraoperative nursing documentation.

3. Conversion of about 4,100 surgeon preference cards.

4. Implant barcode capture and the charge interface to billing.

5. Workflow redesign, downtime procedures and super-user training for perioperative staff.

Out of scope, with reasons:

1. Anesthesia documentation, because the anesthesia group's contract and its own system review run on a separate timeline; it is planned as a follow-on project.

2. Sterile processing instrument tracking, because the department uses a separate system with its own replacement plan.

3. Ambulatory surgery centers not owned by Ashby Valley, because they run their own records.

Sponsor and Governance

The vice president of surgical services sponsors the project because the benefits land in her division, implant revenue and documentation timeliness, and because she controls the operating room schedule needed for training and go-live. A steering committee chaired by the sponsor meets every two weeks and includes the chief nursing officer, the chief medical information officer, the revenue cycle director and a surgeon representative.

Completion Conditions

The project is complete when all three of these are met:

1. Implant charges reconciled against implants scanned at 99 percent or better for two consecutive calendar months.

2. Paper-free intraoperative documentation in all 26 rooms for 30 consecutive surgical days.

3. The standalone scheduling product decommissioned, with historical data archived and readable, before vendor support ends.

Each completion condition is something a reviewer can verify from data, so the project cannot be declared done because people are tired of it.

Benefit Targets After Closure

Completion and benefit are kept apart on purpose. Completion conditions can be verified before the team disbands; benefits mature over a year and belong to operations. Two benefit targets are therefore assigned now to the people who will measure them after the project ends.

1. Unbilled implant lines below 0.5 percent of sampled lines within twelve months of wave 2, measured quarterly by the revenue integrity director against the 3.1 percent audit baseline.

2. Average time from end of surgery to a complete intraoperative record under one hour, measured monthly by the perioperative nursing director against the 26-hour baseline.

Summary Milestones

1. Charter approval: working day 1.

2. Build complete and first integrated test round: about working day 130.

3. First go-live wave, the flagship Ashby Valley Medical Center with fourteen operating rooms: about working day 196.

4. Wave 2 go-live at the two smaller hospitals, Corbin Hill and Pell Harbor, with twelve rooms between them: thirty working days after wave 1.

5. Scheduler decommission and archive read test: before vendor support ends, near working day 290.

Dates are targets until the schedule in Unit 5 is baselined; the go-live order puts the flagship first because its fourteen rooms carry most of the implant volume, so the revenue problem shrinks soonest.

Project Manager Authority

Changes costing less than 10,000 dollars sit within the project manager's own approval when they consume at most half of the float left on the affected chain and leave every completion condition untouched. Larger changes go to a change control board, and steering alone may accept a change that shifts either go-live. The project manager may assign released staff to work packages, request backfill within the training budget and stop a go-live if readiness criteria are not met, reporting to the sponsor within one working day. Writing authority as limits in dollars and working days tells the project manager exactly where discretion ends.

Constraints and Assumptions

1. Budget: $3.4 million, including a 10 percent contingency held by the sponsor.

2. Schedule: wave 1 go-live at the flagship hospital and wave 2 at the other two hospitals, both before vendor support ends.

3. Assumption: the enterprise record vendor delivers the perioperative module release named in the contract.

4. Assumption: perioperative staff can be released for eight hours of training each without canceling cases.

Key Stakeholders

Surgeons, circulating nurses, surgical technologists, perioperative schedulers, sterile processing, materials management, charge entry and revenue cycle, anesthesia, information technology and clinical informatics. A full stakeholder analysis follows in Unit 4.

Initial Risks

1. Preference card conversion falls behind because surgeons do not validate their cards in time.

2. Interface staff are shared with another project during testing.

3. A vendor release lands mid-build and forces rework.

Each initial risk is carried into the full risk register in Unit 7, where it receives an owner and a watched trigger. Listing them here tells the sponsor, before signing, which outcomes would most likely move the dates, and invites her to say which she would most want warned about (Kaplan & Harris-Salamone, 2009).

Why This Charter Is Structured This Way

Every scope line traces to the problem statement: implant capture and the charge interface serve the revenue loss, intraoperative documentation serves the 26-hour delay, and scheduling serves the support deadline. Anything that does not trace back is excluded with a reason. In the project management guide, the charter is the act of authorization itself, the point at which a manager may start spending the organization's people and money (Project Management Institute, 2021), and that permission is only as clear as the scope and completion conditions written beneath it. Studies of health IT implementations stress that a clear, shared statement of purpose is one of the strongest predictors of success (Cresswell et al., 2013).

Approval

Sponsor signature and date. Project manager signature and date.

References

Cresswell, K. M., Bates, D. W., & Sheikh, A. (2013). Ten key considerations for the successful implementation and adoption of large-scale health information technology. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 20(e1), e9-e13. https://doi.org/10.1136/amiajnl-2013-001684

Kaplan, B., & Harris-Salamone, K. D. (2009). Health IT success and failure: Recommendations from literature and an AMIA workshop. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16(3), 291-299. https://doi.org/10.1197/jamia.M2997

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.