Integrated system brings hospital data together

Healthcare industry changes during the 1980s--increased competition and alterations in the Medicare payment methodology--place new and more complex demands on a hospital's information systems, which often fall short of meeting those demands. These systems were designed for financial reporting, billing, or providing clinical data, and few of them are capable of linking with other unrelated systems. Today's hospital manager needs timely and simultaneous access to data from a variety of sources within the hospital. All the elements to accomplish this are collected somewhere in the hospital, but finding them and bringing them together is difficult. The key to the efficient management and use of data bases is in understanding the fundamental concept of relational data bases, which is the capability of linking or joining separate data files through a common data element in each file. In this way, data files may be integrated into a "related" data base. Any number of separate files, or tables, may exist within a "relational" data base as long as a series of threads links them. A strategic management information data base includes the information necessary to analyze, understand, and manage the hospital's markets, products, resources, and profitability. The major components of this information system are the case mix and cost accounting, budgeting, and modeling systems. The case mix and cost accounting factors involve managing concrete pieces of data, whereas the budgeting and modeling factors manipulate data to create a scenario. The strategic management information data base is the foundation of a hospital's decision support system, which is rapidly moving into the category of a necessary tool of the hospital manager's trade.