Institutional Affiliation

Article Review #1
In the article, “District Medical Group Transforms Its Approach to Data Management,” published by the CIO magazine, Olavsrud (2022) writes about data management using the case study of the District Medical Group (DMG). Kevin Rhode, the CIO involved in the DMG’s transition, discusses challenges and lessons from the facility’s data migration process to improve data management for efficiency and meet its healthcare objectives. The process also involved integrating electronic medical records (EMRs) since the acquisition of new clinics necessitated it to promote effective operations and information exchange across the organization. The article’s topic relates to Management Information Systems (MIS) because it explores an organization’s approach to managing its information to support its core function of healthcare delivery. Before the intervention, the DMG’s systems were inefficient and slow, and as such, they impacted its healthcare delivery role. Ultimately, the lessons from the case provide insights to improve the planning and management of data or information within an organizational context.
The article begins by explaining the problem and scope, especially considering the size of the DMG and the issues it was experiencing. The DMG is a fairly large organization with different centers and facilities. For instance, it has a 450-bed acute care facility, three behavioral health centers, and 11 family care centers, among other departments, and serves an average of 450,000 patients annually (Olavsrud, 2022). This description suggests that it deals with a considerably large volume of data. Besides, it sets the foundation to understand the likely problems the organization may face if it maintains inadequate data infrastructure or systems. Olavsrud (2022) further reports the issues as they pertain to the critical aspects of operations at the organization, including disaster recovery, business continuity, and data management. Since the organization is large and generating huge data volumes running on inefficient infrastructure, an obvious problem emerged: the fast data growth slowed down the backup process and made the entire system inefficient (Olavsrud, 2022). Thus, the CIO and his team took a practical approach by identifying the problem before coming up with solutions.
The author also describes the solutions for the two separate problems and the challenges of implementing them. Addressing the data management and backup issue was the priority as it existed even before the acquisition of the new clinics (Olavsrud, 2022). Thus, this issue needed to be addressed whether or not the organization acquired the new clinics. The project team introduced ‘cold storage’ to deal with the vast amounts of data the organization was generating. This strategy relieved the infrastructure of transmitting or holding the least used data in the IT environment, leaving more space for frequently used data. Besides, an intelligent system made this function easier and more efficient (Olavsrud, 2022). Specifically, it reduced storage space consumption and sped up the backup process. The author also notes that it saved the organization some costs, up to $100,000 over three years (Olavsrud, 2022). Notably, increasing efficiency and cost-effectiveness is critical to why organizations implement MIS. Subsequently, the team shifted focus to EMR integration.
Challenges often emerge when dealing with a complex system. In this case, the DMG conducted the complex process of integrating five EMRs. Hence, Olavsrud (2022) outlines the challenges and lessons from this process. The CIO notes that the biggest challenge arose from having a tight timeline. The aim was to integrate the new clinics as quickly as possible since EMRs were critical to the organization’s operations. Consequently, the recommendation is to have more flexible or longer timelines for data migration (Olavsrud, 2022). This aspect goes down to proper planning and understanding that execution brings challenges one may not always be able to control. 
Reference
Olavsrud, T. (2022, July 25). District Medical Group transforms its approach to data management. CIO. https://www.cio.com/article/403487/district-medical-group-transforms-its-approach-to-data-management.html