e-Health Strategy

In this phase we will analyze the E-Health/ICT current state, develop the E-Health/ICT future state vision and conduct a gap analysis to understand the gulf between the current and future vision.  The gap analysis will inform the projects which need to be part of the action plan and ICT strategy.   The objectives of this phase are to:

• Get key stakeholder involved and committed to the project objectives
• Confirm our understanding of the current state of the MOH and Health Regions from a people (organization), process and technology view
• Confirm our understanding of clinical referral patterns and care delivery models at  Primary Care and Hospital Setting levels
• Understand, at a high level, existing E-Health/ICT components (e.g. Disease Registries, Hospital health records and/or EMRs, data centers, tele communication networks, hardware, software, infrastructure), ongoing and planned projects and investments
• Understand privacy and consent policies as they apply to sharing individual Healthcare records
• Understand goals, priorities and business strategy of MOH for Saudi national healthcare in the future.
• Understand the key business issues for the national healthcare
• Understand MOH Governance (Regulatory Framework) and relationship with Saudi healthcare system (regions, healthcare organizations, payers, etc).

During this phase we will design the future state E-Health/ICT strategy for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Health environment.  The future state will be based on leading E-Health practices and standards.  Scenario plans will be developed using input from stakeholders and the IT conceptual architectures and taking into account current constraints. The objectives of this phase are to:

• Construct E-Health, IT and business architectures which can be implemented.
• Develop a project portfolio for potential projects to be implemented in next 5 years
• Develop a future state MOH IT Governance and Organization structure, including accountabilities, roles and responsibilities
  
  Based on the data gathered during Phase 1, IBM team will identify key IT and non-IT strategic projects related to E-Health adoption, facilitate a process of prioritizing these strategic projects and develop an IT Strategy that defines the key projects required from people, processes, standards, policies, applications, infrastructure and information point of view.  The Strategy will also address IT organization and governance issues. This phase of the project will be undertaken between the IBM team and the core team assigned by MOH.  IBM will use its intellectual capital tools, and techniques to facilitate this analysis; the findings will be presented to MOH Project Sponsors.
  We will make extensive use of the IBM’s intellectual capital databases and industry best practice methods (for example, CBM for Health, Healthcare 2015) and tools (e.g. IT Maturity Model) to ensure our solutions incorporate the IT best practices for Healthcare. IBM will also utilize international best practices from World Health Organization (WHO), Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and other such international organizations in healthcare, wherever relevant.
  
  IT Governance and Organization will also focus on development of governance policies, procedures and methodologies to manage the deployment of E-Health in a structured way. Successful adoption of e-Health depends on the implementation of nationwide standards in multiple areas of healthcare business and IT. These standards include ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) for diagnosis, FDB (First Data Bank) for drugs registry, unique national id for patient identification, CPT-4 (Current Procedural Terminology) for clinical procedures, HL-7 for health information electronic exchange, ISO 27001 for data privacy and security, HiTSP (Healthcare Information Technology Standards) for integration and standardization, COBIT (Control Objectives for IT) for IT governance and many others. Based on understanding of the current environment’s maturity and future vision, proper judgment needs to be exercised to decide which of these standards will be adopted in Saudi healthcare space going forward. IBM will help the MOH identify these potential standards that will act as a backbone for e-Health adoption in Saudi.

The final phase of this project is to consolidate the findings and the decisions that have been taken in previous phases of the project, to evaluate strategic options of how MOH can implement the strategy (in-house/out-sourced) and to assign a timeline for the implementation. The development of the five-years-Roadmap will be undertaken jointly with the project team from MOH.

During this phase of the IT Strategy project, we will develop a high level implementation strategy and the 5 year action plan.  We will also develop a high level business case for the program (both business and IT systems). The objectives of this phase are to:

• Prioritize the project portfolio based on agreed upon criteria
• Develop a multi-staged five year action plan
• Develop supporting plans for the ICT Strategy Roadmap
• Design Policies and procedures required to support the action plan
• Design the E-Health and IT organization required to implement and sustain the strategy
• Develop a Change Management Strategy and all supporting methods, processes and standards