Funding management

Press, 4 March 1989, Page 9

Funding management

Management of hospital funding will be improved with a new management information system piloted in several hospitals throughout New Zealand, said the Minister of Health, Ms Clark, yesterday. Hospitals in Waikato, Rotorua and Dunedin were piloting a "resource utilisation system" developed by the Health Services Management Development Unit, said Ms Clark. The system would soon be implemented in Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington, Napier and Wanganui. Using the system, the

cost of providing treatment, therapy or diagnosis in a hospital could be analysed to ascertain the cost*of the service, said Ms Clark. “The system also involves recording and analysing the utilisation of those services prescribed by individual clinicians to individual patients,” she said. Poor management information had been a long-standing problem in the hospital sector, said Ms Clark. “An inevitable consequence of inadequate information is that the people who make decisions are unaware of the costs of the resources

they use. “The cry is frequently for more money. Yet often we need to look at the way in which we are deploying the resources we already have.” Better hospital information systems and improved management accounting and costing systems would be a significant step towards ensuring that the 70 per cent of the health vote allocated to hospitals was spent in the best way, she said. Ms Clark was speaking at the opening of the Waikato Hospital Board's regional blood transfusion centre in Hamilton.