[Program for medicalization of the information systems in France: tool for management and quality assessment?]

We analyzed data reported in the scientific literature to assess how the program for medicalizing information systems employed in France for budget management and allocation could be used to evaluate health care quality.

In France the PMSI (Programme de Médicalisation des Systèmes d'Information) is used outside health care facilities to plan an allocate health care budgets. Within each facility, it can be used to coordinate external and internal resource allocations. The goal is to medicalize management decisions. Certain methods are based on calculations of total costs per hospital stay and others on the construction of budgets for individual units.

Medical criteria of final outcome of health care, for example mortality, are widely used for inter-hospital comparisons. The PMSI can be a useful tool for monitoring inter-hospital comparisons if three prerequisites are met: comparable data, identification of convenient tracers of care episodes or clinical situations, and multifactorial adjustment to account for variations in rates. The most widely used adjustment factors concern patient characteristics: age, sex, case severity, comorbidity, socio-economic level and hospital characteristics: size and status, number of stays and interventions, emergency and intensive care activity, referral practices.