Discussion: "Strategy Concerns and Effective Management" Please respond to the following:

• From the first e-Activity, analyze the process for developing an IT budget within a health care organization, and select one aspect of the budgeting process which is the most difficult to execute. Next, suggest one technique which you could use to overcome the difficulty that you selected. Provide a rationale to support your response.

• From the second e-Activity, determine the key reasons why change management in health care IT is a hot-button issue. Next, among the eight fundamental stages for the process of change described by Kotter, select the most significant stage, and suggest one way to complete the stage in question. Provide a rationale to support your response.

To develop an IT budget, one must decide first what items need to be covered. The list should include things such as payroll to run the IT, software, and hardware that is needed. The budget must also define the cost of running the IT department for a health care organization. The budget itself may also change depending on adding or subtracting costs.

There are two major areas of concern when establishing a budget- the first of which is deciding how to continue being competitive with the new Medicare/Medicaid limitations. The second challenge is the consumer aspect- if they factor into the budget. When forming the budget they have input from many areas- this can include the CEO, CFO and the finance department. (Andrews, 2009)

The one aspect of the budget process is determining what the final budget will be in relation to the insurers. The insurance companies have new laws put into place - which can change reimbursement very quickly. This could change a budget rather quickly and they would need to rethink their strategies.

The reason why management in health care IT is such a hot button issue is due to the constantly changing environment. With new health care laws, new factors are always being taken into consideration. Training always needs to be implement and revised with the new changes.

The eight fundamental steps for the process of change are increase urgency, build guiding teams, get the vision right, communication for buy-in, enable action, create short-term wins, don't let up and make it stick. Of these 8 steps the one that is the most significant is get the vision right. When any organization needs to complete a goal they need to define that goal explicitly. There should generally not be any grey areas, and everyone should understand what needs to be accomplished. To complete the stage in question, team leaders should get together and write down all aspects of the goal. This should then be distributed to the staff/employees.