A Study on the Utilization of Hospital Information System (Ward and Physician) Modules in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Hospital information system (HIS) is a key managerial tool for any hospital administrator. It gives him all requisite information online, wherever he is and whatever he is doing, so that he can apply timely interventions and set the things right and thereby take care of patient safety, quality improvement, and also minimize litigation problems in the hospitals.
After the initial introduction of HIS into the organization, the key findings were that the entire hospital operations are HIS driven. From the registration and admission of the patient, to the discharge summary generation of an inpatient, the entire process is guided by the HIS. It was found that the HIS is billing-centric, i.e., the HIS use pathway begins only when the registration fee is billed and the unique health identification number (UHID) of a patient is generated.
The main HIS modules under study are the Ward module and the Physician module. After conducting a utilization study using a structured questionnaire, it is found that the level of utilization of the Ward module is 36.4% and that of the Physician module is 6.66%. Using a Fishbone analysis, the causes of reduced HIS utilization have been identified and using a Pareto analysis the main causes have been found to be Work culture and Lack of mobile handheld devices. Various recommendations have been made to increase the HIS usage.