Abstract
Faced with rising costs, growing demand and declining funding, hospitals and others
must either cut services or improve the efficiency and effectiveness of what they
do. Neither solution can be implemented without adequate relevant information. Without
understanding which services are providing the most value to its customers, sensible
cutbacks will be difficult to make. Improving efficiency requires a knowledge of where
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 containing detailed health care patient data.
In this paper, we present continuous improvement techniques as a requirement for the
design and development ofthis much needed database.
Keywords
Systems Design - Quality Management - Decision-Support
Systems
