Partners Healthcare System (PHS): Transforming Health Care Services Delivery Through Information Management

This case considers the process of organizational transformation undertaken by Partners Healthcare System (PHS) since the 1990s as their hospital and affiliated ambulatory medical practices have adopted both EMR and CPOE systems. Encompassing a strategic investment in information technologies, wide-spread process change, and the pervasive use of institutional clinical decision support and knowledge management systems, this story has been 15 years in the making, culminating in 2009 with the network-wide use of EMR and CPOE by all PHS doctors. These developments in turn opened the door to the redefinition of services delivery and to the replacement of established therapies through the leveraging of the knowledge residing in 4.6 million now-digitized PHS patient records. As such, the PHS experience serves as a window into how one organization strove to address the daunting challenges of 21st century health care services information management, as a template for success in the implementation of large-scale information systems among research-based hospitals across the United States, and more broadly as a learning platform for industry executives in their efforts to transform health care delivery through data and knowledge management.

• Change Management
• Health Administration
• Decision Support Systems
• Information Systems
• Northeastern