Personnel

Basic Profile Personnel Skills and Proficiency Personnel Recommendations

Basic Profile

Information Management at Children's Memorial Hospital has a staff of 49. Their functions include infrastructure maintenance, provision of hospital wide applications, and support of employees use of those applications. The Health Information Management Department is also part of the Information Management Department. The Information Management department does not have staff dedicated to data management for clinical research purposes, nor are there staff who provide services of writing code for configuration of applications for these purposes. Michael Miller, MD

Personnel Skills and Proficiency

Personnel are an essential element in realizing the new technology vision that is being proposed. In considering personnel, it is evident that the new vision needs to come from the highest levels of our organizations in order to reach all the required constituencies. Human Resources has an especially critical role to play and will likely require a major reorientation regarding technology assessments in hiring, technology training of existing employees, proficiency testing and use of technology to measure performance.

The technology skill sets of existing personnel are not well documented. Human Resources relies on self-reported documentation in hiring new employees. In other industries, technology personnel requirements and proficiency are carefully documented:

1. Abraham Lincoln Digital High School; also proficiency standards
2. Virginia Public Schools
3. Albemarle County (Virginia) Schools
4. service provider carefully documents credentials
5. Example of a specific proficiency test
6. A Technology Strategic Plan incorporating personnel development
7. Specific tests are available to test programming aptitude or proficiency; also for network administration and systems analysis

There are few tools currently in place to measure users proficiency with technology that they use in managing their workflows.

There is also minimal use of technology to assess employee performance. The ACD phones provide data on call volume at different times of day for each ACD group. Data can be obtained to the level of specific users. The Cadence scheduling permits extractions of information about specific employees. These data are important in assessing personnel performance and in identifying bottlenecks requiring management intervention. As technology improvements are introduced, careful attention should be directed towards their ability to extract employee management data. The optimal use of technology ultimately depends on the users and systems should be considered to measure their performance and the usability of the technology.

If multiple personnel are having problems with a given technology, then its usability is in question. Employees can be involved in quality improvement by being actively engaged in technology application feedback.

Personnel Recommendations

The PTTF recommends:

• a high level strategic plan for technology personnel requirements
• a reevaluation of hiring procedures with a view towards better assessment of technology skill before hiring decisions are many
• a systematic assessment of current employee's technology skills and a better alignment of skills with training and job functions
• introducing usability testing and monitoring of usability to identify technology bottlenecks
• creating test environments for technology applications during development so that usability testing can be done early in the development cycle

David A. Stumpf, MD, PhD