University of Missouri Health Care outsourcing IT resources?

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Jerry Fahrni

Columbia Tribune: “Cerner talks confirmed by officials – University of Missouri Health Care is now negotiating with the Kansas City-based Cerner Corp., administrators have confirmed. MU Health information technology workers have been worried for months that their jobs could be outsourced to Cerner, considered one of the leading health information technology providers. Several employees have said supervisors told them different Cerner-related stories, but mostly workers have been kept in the dark. Williamson and Ross said employees would be notified “promptly” if a Cerner agreement is made. The university has a longstanding relationship with Cerner. The company provides hardware products for the hospital and has an educational partnership with the MU School of Medicine.” - The University of Missouri Health Care may not be handling the situation in the most gracious way possible, but I’ve mentioned before that I think outsourcing IT resources is a good idea. It’s simply unreasonable to expect locally developed IT resources to have the same knowledgebase as the IT resources at the company providing the product. And it’s probably cheaper, too.

Categories: Technology | Tags: IT Projects, IT Staffing, Outsourcing

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2 Responses to “University of Missouri Health Care outsourcing IT resources?”

Defiant says:

October 11, 2009 at 7:57 pm

If your view on the outsourced resources is right then why is Cerner affecting this Institute by using the staff from the existing IT org?

Have you ever looked at the customer satisfaction ratings Cerner has for their various services? Hard to believe those results will fare well over time at MU.
Jerry Fahrni says:

October 12, 2009 at 11:45 am

I can only speculate on why Cerner is using existing staff at this institution. One thing that comes to mind is the lack of qualified IT resources available for hire. In addition, I have never looked at the customer satisfaction ratings from Cerner, but can only imagine that they are similar to the customer ratings for many providers of healthcare information systems. I know I am very unhappy with the level of customer support from our vendor, Siemens. With that said, when I’ve had the opportunity to work directly with Siemens consultants at our facility the level of support increases dramatically. Those consultants have knowledge about our system that I simply don’t have access to. I an tell you for certain that our current support infrastructure doesn’t work. If it can’t be fixed by re-booting, our IT support is typically lost.

I think you may have misunderstood my meaning of outsourcing IT support. I would like to see vendors supply trained support services on site at facilities utilizing their systems. As I said above, they may offer unique perspectives about their systems that “local resources” don’t have. Thanks for stopping by.