Incorporating operations research techniques to evaluate information systems impact on healthcare

Over the past 4 years, the Hospice Palliative Care Network Project, co-led by the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Toronto Community Care Access Centre, has been working toward developing an innovative model of home palliative care coordination and service delivery. After a successful completion of stage one involving data collection of approximately 400 variables to a common Linux database repository, the current stage of the Project is to compare various modes of care delivery and disseminate the results to internal and external evaluation stakeholders. The Temmy Latner Centre's customized Panacea Information Management System (PIMS) had been linked to the Linux repository in order to customize reports to determine the optimal model of coordination and service delivery that could serve as a template for home palliative care delivery in Ontario. The objective of this paper is to outline the development and functionality of the PIMS and to evaluate its contribution in terms of improved data quality and health outcomes; in other words, to justify the information systems investment by demonstrating the relationship between this investment and improved health system delivery and effectiveness.