Additional Providian Trust thoughts

This past week I presented on the Providian Trust case where an old company had to install new technology. This, along with the class discussion on the case got me thinking about a few things. As someone who worked in the healthcare industry I can see where problems arose with the implementation of the new technology with the older employees. There were nurses and therapists who worked for our hospital who had been doing their job for a long time, and were very good at it, but did not use technology on a daily basis.

At one point it was decided that the therapists, and a few other areas, would stop filling out billing forms and giving them to the business office, where I worked, and would input the data themselves. In theory this was a good idea, but this was taking these people away from what they did best and dealing with a program that had problems of its own. Not surprisingly, several problems emerged, but the plan was eventually implemented and as far as I know, it was successful to an extent. I did hear that problems still arose though because these were people whose job has never involved a computer, and as far as I can tell, the core job will never be a computer based job.

So the question the is asked: "Is it always a good idea to add more technology to a job?" In both the hospital and at Providian I would say that there was a need for it. But was it the best thing to do? At Providian they obviously had problems that needed to be addressed, and it was felt that those problems could be fixed with technology. We never did find out the end result of the project at Providian, as there is nothing out there on the web about them other than the case study. But in the hospital, I would grade the implementation a success but would not have done it if I was in charge. In my opinion it is not always the best thing to take a person who has a good skill (such as nursing, therapy, etc.) and assume they can do anything and everything with technology as well as they do nursing. All we did was add another layer of stress to a job that is already stressful at times.

I think when you take someone out of their core competency within the work place problems can arise. Instead I think it is best for a company when you have people talented in different areas working together. Then everybody can be the most successful at their job. In our case at the hospital, we should have let the nurses and therapists continue to just fill out the paperwork and let the people who knew the billing program best, deal with it.