If you’re looking to take the clinical informatics board exam, you’re going to have to know about change management in two different ways. The first in the leadership/expectation management of large-scale organizational change and the second in the way of managing changes as a part of project management. We’re going to deal with the latter here.
The Project Management Version of Change Management
…Or as the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) likes to put it: “Integrated Change Control”…
According to the fourth version of the PMBOK Integrated Change Control is the process of:
- Reviewing all change requests
- Approving changes
- Managing changes
Changes that impact the deliverables, organizational process assets, project documents and the project management plan from project inception to termination or completion must be continuously managed (p. 93).
The following activities may occur during the change management process:
- Promptly reviewing, analyzing, and approving or rejecting change requests
- Ensuring that “workarounds” or “loopholes” are closed and requesters go through the correct process
- Managing approved changes
- Incorporating only approved changes into the project management plan, deliverables, organizational process assets and other project documents
- Coordinate approved changes across the project’s scope, cost, risk, quality, resources, and other project aspects
- Promptly reviewing, analyzing, and approving or rejecting corrective/preventive actions and mitigation strategies association with the change
- Documenting the completion and impact of change requests
What to Include in Your Change Management Plan
Your organization may choose to implement an overarching change management plan or may choose to implement a change management plan on an ad-hoc basis or for large projects. We recommend that at the very least every significant change in your organization is documented in some way. Should you choose to go the way of the overarching change management plan (go you!), here are some key concepts and processes you should include in your plan:
How you plan to manage the above activities and processes:
- Change Assessment by the Change Manager and Change Advisory Board
- Managing and Tracking Requests for Change
- Assessing and Implementing Emergency Changes
- Change Authorization and Scheduling
- Deployment of Major and Minor Changes
- Post Change Implementation Review
Roles and responsibilities for the following personnel:
- Change Manager
- Change Advisory Board
- Emergency Change Advisory Board
Any required or recommended documentation such as a:
- Change Request Form
- Change Record Checklist
- Post Implementation Review Checklist
- Schedule of Changes Checklist
How is Change Management in Healthcare Different?
In addition to taking the usual impacts on IT infrastructure and business areas into account, health IT management should also assess how new changes will impact patients and providers. As IT minded individuals, we often focus on how technical changes will affect our “system”, but not always on how it will affect the well-being and happiness of our patients and providers.
And happy patients mean more returning customers, patients that will recommend others, while happy providers mean a better work environment and less turnover…
Feel free to download, change, and personalize the change request form above as needed.
If you can’t see the document above, here is the link.