HMSS: A management support system for concurrent hospital decision making

Mounting health care costs have escalated the pressure on hospitals and other health care providers to control expenses. Conventional hospital information systems help meet the challenge by providing data necessary for policy formation and outcome measurement. Additional decision support systems deliver models that can be used to systematically evaluate the policies. When deployed successfully, each stand-alone system can effectively support a segment of the hospital decision making process. Integrating the stand-alone functions can enhance the quality and efficiency of the segmented support, create synergistic effects, and augment decision making performance and value. A high-level integration framework, known as the management support system (MSS), can be adapted to provide the desired synthesis. This paper demonstrates how management support systems can improve hospital decision making. It overviews the hospital decision making process, presents an MSS for supporting this process, and measures the impact of the MSS on the process and outcomes of decision making. The paper also examines the implications of the analyses for information systems research and health care practice.