Hospital Gelderse Vallei has improved visualization of eHealth
Gelderse Vallei Hospital - Facts & Figures - In the centre of the Netherlands, Gelderse Vallei (Hospital) is within reach of 230.000 inhabitants. Gelderse Vallei Hospital and Wageningen University closely cooperate on the subject of nutrition.
Background
Gelderse Vallei Hospital, the Dutch nutrition and top care-focused hospital is already for years working with enterprise architecture in projects. As a result, they have more grip over risks in projects.
eHealth at Gelderse Vallei Hospital
The Gelderse Vallei Hospital makes more and more use of eHealth to improve their services and products in order to create a better stay and care for the patients. For that, they have many projects running together with suppliers on transforming processes, services and IT.
The Case
The enterprise architects and their manager were in need of communicative visualizations to create more support, time to work with enterprise architecture and awareness among the board of directors.
The enterprise architecture visualizations they currently created and used did not get the message well enough as they would like to have seen.
Solution Strategy
Our approach was to train the enterprise architects in using Dragon1 as a visualization tool for Enterprise Architecture, so they would be equipped with new capabilities for visualizing highly communicative enterprise architecture visualizations.
In the training we used practical eHealth and Health Care cases and learned the enterprise architects to formulate and visualize (as drawing, sketch and diagram) enterprise architecture principles in the Dragon1 way and next project the enterprise architecture principles onto the organization and to create an impact analysis/report view.
These visualizations of principles and projections are very much used as communication towards management (informal sketches), operational workers (informal drawings) and suppliers/engineers (formal diagrams).
Dragon1 Foundation Training & Dragon1 EA Tool User Training
The enterprise architects of the enterprise architecture team first started with lightweight training in the Dragon1 Open EA Method supported by the Dragon1 Platform as EA Tool. This resulted in the ability of the enterprise architects to create more effective enterprise architecture visualizations for use with their internal clients (stakeholders).
Dragon1 Foundation Certification with eHealth focus
A follow-up was a Dragon1 Foundation certification. One of the enterprise architects of Gelderse Vallei Hospital did various supplements to the first training completing the curriculum of the Dragon1 Foundation Level 1 Certification. The enterprise architect is now a Dragon1 Certified Architect (Level 1). In the training period (Dragon1 Foundation Training leads to certification within 20 weeks times) the enterprise architect has aligned generic courseware cases to an eHealth and care-specific context.
Challenges
During our project at Gelderse Vallei Hospital we had to deal with the time pressure these enterprise architects have and how hard it is to get the correct information or data (on requirements, standards and configurations) at the right time to create in-depth visualizations.
Constantly they need to advise projects on domain-specific architectural issues, leaving them not having time to draw the big picture or overall landscapes so they can place these issues in a broader context.
We dealt with that by providing template visualizations in Dragon1 that make it easier and faster to create a big picture or overall landscape of applications, processes and IT Infrastructure. Also, we provided the team with a Dragon1 Architecture Baseline Products definition and a Dragon1 working schedule (weekly & monthly) reserving time for ad-hoc, regular and planned activities. With this, the enterprise architects know when to make what architecture product and also have time to do it.
We dealt with the problem of information and data retrieval by providing templates and reference models in Dragon1 and training the enterprise architects in making assumptions and visualizing where they made assumptions and making it a concern for the stakeholders to deal with the assumptions. This way of working in Dragon1 speeds up processes and make sure the enterprise architects do not have to sit waiting on others and causing a delay in the chain or projects.
Outcomes
The training and using Dragon1 resulted in increased capabilities of the enterprise architects in visualizing highly communicable enterprise architecture visualizations. Enterprise Architects are now able to create decision-making visualizations for eHealth implementation projects.
The training approach with customizable courseware cases realized a win-win: the enterprise architects could create very meaningful architecture products for their own architecture portfolio, as part of the Dragon1 Foundation Training. And they also could make a head start in creating enterprise architecture visualizations that will be directly used in the eHealth program at the hospital. During the training period, the enterprise architects already had success using enterprise architecture visualizations. The board of directors was very enthusiastic about the work of the enterprise architects.
One of the great results was a set of concept sketches and principle details drawings on health care and eHealth topics.
Dragon1 supports creating decision-supporting visualizations to explain difficult things in an understandable way at Gelderse Vallei Hospital. This supports executing projects and managing risk in an environment where safety & security is of the highest importance.
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