Peachtree Case Study Answers

Question 3
Executive Summary
Peachtree’s mission is to ensure a quality, consistent and continuity of care across the entire network of care facilities but to deliver all of this at the highest levels of efficiency, economy, and respect for patients and staff.
In order to be competitive in the health industry, Peachtree has obtained a number of varying health institutes via mergers. This leads to PH’s major IT infrastructure problems - the information systems of each acquired institutions are incompatible and disconnected with each other. The current system faces the issues of inefficiencies of the company processes and procedures, and the meantime, the instability increases and maintenance cost is high. CEO of PH Max Berndt is trying to
Time used to achieve the goal: the longer the time used, the more cost will be spent.

Risk: measurement method - degree of uncertainty. Due to no industry record, the risk must be carefully considered.
Alternatives and Recommendation
Strategy to select:
Peachtree’s mission is to ensure a quality, consistent and continuity of care across the entire network of care facilities but to deliver all of this at the highest levels of efficiency, economy, and respect for patients and staff. The IT Strategy must be consistence with this objective. An end to end standardization with a clear conscience is not suitable for health care since different institutions have their own unique doctor-oriented identities. So the PH’s best long term bet is cautious approaching to standardization (selective standardization) and preserving the hospitals’ flexibility.
The following alternatives are outlined in this analysis of Peachtree:
a. Monoliths: complete unification of all healthcare facilities into a single institution with multiple campuses by standardizing the entire business. This however is tested and will cost approximately $500 Billion - $1 Trillion – potential to increase 3-5 times
And whether it could work for the health industry. The risk is high.
Recommendation:
Evaluating pros and cons of both SOA and monolithic system, SOA seems less expensive in the long run than the monolithic system. It is recommended PH to apply SOA because of low costs, easy to use, flexible and low time consuming.
Risk Management Plan
If PH decides to adopt the SOA to redesign its IT system, it will involve the risk. Moreover, the risk will be high to PH since there is no industry track record. PH has to take actions and plan to reduce the risk.
The risk from medical respective
a. The SOA is lack of industry record. Nobody could tell whether SOA works for health care business; and there is uncertainty on the time used, cost spent, etc. To reduce this risk, PH should reference the successful SOA systems which have been used in other industry. It should provide some experience to reduce the risk.

b. The unique doctor-oriented identities require that information system to be highly flexible. SOA meets this requirement since it is services oriented. But this will reduce the consistence and interoperability; therefore it will decrease the information exchange from different parties. To reduce this risk, PH should take the approach of selective standardization. It will provide the flexibility which the health care needs and standardize the business