MIT SDM Systems Thinking Webinar Series
David Hartzband, DSc, Research Affiliate, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, MIT; Founder and Principal, Post Technical Research
Date: November 28, 2016
About the Presentation
Primary Care Associations (PCAs) are the federally chartered, one-per-state organizations responsible for providing guidance and services to federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). This webinar will focus on the PCA in Texas, the Texas Association of Community Health Centers (TACHC), which serves 72 of the state’s 94 FQHCs, supporting approximately 2 million patients a year. The TACHC provides:
- information technology (IT) consulting, deployment, and management of a statewide high-speed healthcare network;
- development and maintenance services for a Health Center Controlled Network (HCCN) that supplies a data warehouse for clinical and demographic data across all centers;
- analysis and interpretation of clinical and demographic data for clinical and operational improvement; and
- an accountable-care organization for a group of health centers.
Non-IT related services are also provided.
In this webinar, Dr. David Hartzband will:
- describe how he evaluated the technical infrastructure, organizational structure and processes, and cultural environment of the entity providing these services;
- outline his findings, which included discovering highly conventional structures and technical components that were approximately three to five years out of date;
- share a plan developed to update the health IT infrastructure and associated organizational structures; and
- describe how this plan was received by the executive director and staff of the TACHC.
He will also outline the plan’s implementation and current status while sharing the challenges involved in working with organizational structures, processes, and culture.
A Q&A will follow the presentation. We invite you to join us!
About the Speaker
David Hartzband, DSc, is a research affiliate at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He is also the founder and principal of Post Technical Research, a technology consulting firm specializing in healthcare information technology and machine intelligence.
About the Series
Sponsored by the System Design & Management (SDM) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the MIT SDM Systems Thinking Webinar Series features research conducted by SDM faculty, alumni, students, and industry partners. The series is designed to disseminate information on how to employ systems thinking to address engineering, management, and socio-political components of complex challenges. Recordings and slides from prior SDM webinars can be accessed at sdm.mit.edu.
