Managing resources in a better way: a new financial management approach for the University of Michigan Medical School.

Responding to changing trends in how the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) has been traditionally financed and anticipating that these trends will continue, in 2002 the executive leadership at the UMMS embarked upon a course designed to change not only the school's financial structure but its management culture as well. Changing traditional ways of thinking about budgets and developing a set of key performance indicators that demonstrate how certain activities shape the use of resources has brought greater understanding of how to optimize those resources to the greatest extent. Through internally developed Web-based software applications called M-STAT, M-DASH and M-ALERT (which are strategic reporting tools that the author describes), the UMMS now can manage resources in a completely different way. These tools are used to spot general financial trends or examine a more specific financial element (such as trends in grant funding or clinical activity), track the utilization of research space, calculate the break-even cost of research space, and most important, model various "what-if" scenarios to help plan effectively for the future needs of the UMMS. The strategic reporting system is still being integrated throughout the UMMS, so there has not yet been time to measure the system's efficacy or its shortcomings. Nevertheless, important lessons have already been learned, which the author presents.