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Moving to a new software suite allowed Sisters of Mercy Health System to change a month-long process to a week.
Sisters of Mercy Health System (Chesterfield, Mo.) recently completed its largest-ever technology implementation. In February of this year, 19 of the organization's hospitals and outpatient facilities went live with Lawson's (St. Paul, Minn.) Supply Chain Management suite, replacing the health system's previous application from McKesson (San Francisco).
Prior to the Lawson implementation, Mercy had been using McKesson's Pathways Material Management (PPM) system to meet its supply chain requirements. However, when it came time for an upgrade, Jayson Chitwood, executive director of financial applications, Mercy Information Services Division, contends that the McKesson solution "didn't quite fit our business needs." According to Chitwood, the McKesson solution is still very siloed. "Although the supply chain capabilities of the solution are very good, it doesn't provide a continuous solution set for financials," he says. "We're really trying to centralize all of our business processes, so finding a fully integrated supply chain, financial, arid HR system was a priority."
Until last year, McKesson didn't have any kind of payroll solution, says Adam Gale, executive vice president of operations, KLAS Enterprises. "They've only just purchased one via a third party, but it's still in the early days. So someone wanting a full financial solution might struggle with McKesson's system because their payroll module is still unproven."
According to Mike McCurry, Sisters of Mercy CIO, there was a dearth of solutions that offered a single unified ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. "Honestly, there weren't that many companies to choose from," he says. Mercy looked at the solution offered by Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.), "but it was viewed as too difficult to implement, and only offered a slice of what we needed."
Keeping up
Gale surmises that as the technology within the medical arena has increased, so has the complexity...