The CIO and IRM (information resources management) alliance: maneuvering for the competitive edge in hospital information management

In 1986, Johns noted that "The hospital industry was caught unprepared for the external demands and information needs required in a case-mix reimbursement environment." Lack of a data-processing philosophy and inattention to external forces were cited as having hampered technology upgrade and integration of financial and clinical databases. The intervening years have witnessed a growth of information dissemination in the health care industry concerning information value and resource management. The frequency of appearance of articles on information management in the professional literature and the number of workshops and professional meetings addressing the topic attest to the current visibility of the information resource. Despite this flurry of interest, the industry has not developed its own models of information resources management nor validated its information evolution with accepted management information systems models. While interest in health care information resource management exists, understanding of the complex issues in this area has not developed as one would expect. While there are a myriad of reasons for this, a contributing factor is the lack of a research foundation for development and application of theory and models. Even though various graduate programs exist in medical informatics and biomedical computing, few concentrate on the study of health information resource management from an organizational perspective. Because of this, academic research in the area has been minimal. The scarcity of graduate-level programs has also meant that few individuals have been educated to deal with the challenges of managing the many disparate functional activities associated with health care information resource management. Due to a variety of internal and external forces, extreme demands were placed on the hospital information resource during the past decade.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)