Abstract
The effective management of information in hospital should be driven by the same factors affecting today's reimbursement systems and diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Such an information management system should support the goals of productivity, and should be based on total productivity management concepts. Inadequate definitions of productivity provide a false sense of success for health care organizations and should never be substitutes for formal measurement approaches.
This paper presents a framework for integrating costs into the hospital-wide information system for the purpose of productivity management. An analytical model that is based on the concept of total resource consumption is developed and presented along with an actual case example. As a result of the increasing volume and complexity of resource consumption information, it is not only vital to use computers, it is necessary in today's health care environment.
