Mercy Health Partners: Do More With Less

The IT department at Mercy Health Partners, which owns six hospitals in southwest Ohio, is frequently stressed and stretched. At any given time the tech staff has as many as 4,000 projects in progress—everything from resetting user IDs to installing new clinical systems. And while the cost crunch is hitting this health-care provider along with the rest of the industry, Mercy is expanding: It's building a hospital in Toledo.

To help match the availability of his IT resources with the demand, Mercy CIO Jim Albin brought in Project Office, industrial-strength project management software from Pacific Edge. Beyond allowing the scheduling, budgeting, and staffing of individual projects, Project Office aggregates Mercy's entire project portfolio, letting managers see at a glance how personnel and resources are being used companywide. Mercy's five functional business committees, each with its own allocated slice of the corporate IT budget, can see where the dollars are going. "They can't all spend the same IT dollar at the same time," says Albin. "Given a lack of information, everyone feels that they own it all." The software shows business managers what can and can't be done.

Albin says the software enabled Mercy to take $4 million in costs out of what had been a $13 million IT budget. Some of that—about $1.8 million—has come through staff reductions; the rest resulted from scaling back contracts, maintenance agreements, hardware buys, and other spending.

Copyright © 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Ziff Davis Smart Business.