Seeding information management capacity to support operational management in hospitals

There are vast amounts of regularly reported data in the information systems of hospitals, state and federal governments. The increase in accessibility offered by platforms such as the Health Information Exchange (HIE) in New South Wales (NSW) creates a new level of opportunity. Administrative data can also speak to clinical and managerial issues. The capacity to mine these data and use the information for improving quality and efficiency has not been well developed at the "coal face" of operational management. Whilst it has been both possible and useful to track utilisation of services to hospitals and patients as cost and volume, it has not been of interest to track these same data to the operational locus of care--the nursing unit, the operating room, the imaging department. With HIE-type systems, the information is now more readily available and operational managers know this. The challenge is to develop the interdisciplinary capacity to query administrative data to facilitate clinical and managerial decision-making. We report here a possible model of a systematic approach to developing this capacity and some of the results of equipping operational and clinical managers to study problems in their own work settings. These efforts have required no additional internal resources, while the payoffs have been considerable.