Case Study

SUBJECT TITLE | MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM/ STRATEGY INFORMATION SYSTEM MANAGEMENT |

UNIT CODE | CB304 / BB308 |

UNIT LECTURER | NURHIDAYAH BAHAR |

CASE STUDY4 | VIRTUAL THERE |

Dr. Laura Esserman leans forward and speaks with conviction, making broad gestures withher hands. ‘‘Over the past couple of decades, I’ve watched industries be transformed bythe use of information systems and incredible visual displays,’’ she says. ‘‘What we could dois to completely change the way we work—just by changing the way we collect and shareinformation.’’

Sounds familiar, right? But Esserman isn’t championing yet another overzealous SiliconValley start-up—she’s envisioning how cancer patients will interact with their doctors. IfEsserman, a Stanford-trained surgeon and MBA, has her way, patients won’t sit passively onan exam table, listening to impenetrable diagnoses and memorizing treatment instructions.

Instead, they’ll have access to a multimedia treasure chest of real-time diagnosis, treatment,and success-rate data from thousands of cases like their own. Better still, they won’t meetwith just one doctor. There will be other doctors on the case—some from the other side ofthe hospital and some, perhaps, from the other side of the world.

Esserman and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco’s Carol FrancBuck Breast Care Center are pioneers in the new world of virtual teams and virtual tools,a world in which there will be real change in the way highly trained people whose workdepends on intense collaboration get things done.Her goal at the Buck Breast Care Center isto use virtual tools to bring more useful information (and more doctors) into the exam room.

Why? Because two heads really are better than one. She explains that when patients seetheir doctors after a breast cancer diagnosis, for example, they are handed a recommendedcourse of treatment that involves serious choices and trade-offs. Of course, most patientsdon’t know...