At first glance, the thought of branding the IT department might be something completely outside a CIOs expertise.
Not so, says Steve Handy, senior vice president at Uniontown Hospital. Handy, whose responsibilities at the Pennsylvania health system include oversight of finance, IT, and risk management, has spent the last five years creating a division identity which has served to communicate the department’s value to the hospital in a myriad of ways.
Uniontown Hospital began adopting clinical systems a decade ago and as the IT department grew, Handy saw a need to create a new, energized identity.
“When we started getting more heavily involved in our technology journey, it got awkward because IT used to report to the finance division. In my opinion, it gave the impression that IT was a second class citizen,” he explains. “Everything in hospitals tend to focus on clinical side. Nobody else matters unless something’s not working.”
Handy renamed his division five years ago, calling it the FIRM, which stands for Finance, Information, and Risk Management. “All of our departmental tag lines, emails and other communications say ‘part of the FIRM division’. Instead of each department having its own identity, people see that they’re interdependent and that there are lots of components that make the hospital run successfully,” Handy says.
In addition to rebranding the division, Handy’s team has also identified a group objective (GO), which they’ve named Embracing the Future with Strength.
“As a division, we’re looking to the future and we’re helping the organization be here for the community. To tie in with that idea, for example, our financial objective is Strength in Numbers, and our IT objective is Power in Information,” he explains.
Similarly, each department has a departmental objective (DO) as well. “For IT, the DO is Assuring IT Matters. You need technology to move forward and our job is to ensure that the technology matters and is relevant to our users.”
Handy says that end result of creating objectives and identities for the division and the departments within it have been well worth it. In addition to the departments’ understanding their own roles and the role of the division as a whole, there is widespread recognition of the positive contributions the FIRM brings to the hospital.
“What it’s really done is brought a unified identity to the business support that allows the hospital to run and operate,” he says. “In fact so much so that I hear from clinicians that everything’s about the FIRM,” he says.
Copyright 2011 Algonquin Professional Publishing, LLC
