TOTAL QUALITY IN INFORMATION-SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT - ISSUES FOR THE HEALTH-CARE INDUSTRY

Faced with rising costs, growing demand and declining funding, hospita ls and others must either cut services or improve the efficiency and e ffectiveness of what they do. Neither solution can be implemented with out adequate relevant information. Without understanding which service s are providing the most value to its customers, sensible cutbacks wil l be difficult to make. Improving efficiency requires a knowledge of w here there are inefficiencies, and improving effectiveness requires an understanding of what the outcomes of health care are. The solution, as many have documented, is to create, as a first step, a database con taining detailed health care patient data. In this paper, we present c ontinuous improvement techniques as a requirement for the design and d evelopment of this much needed database.