The hospital—A different kind of business

Conclusion

From the views expressed or quoted here, and from their logical extensions, the author draws the following conclusions and recommendations: (1) In a hospital, expecially a teaching hospital of significant size, the traditional rôle of the chief administrator or director should be enlarged to conform to accepted modern standards of a middle management team. (2) Hospital directors and other members of the operating executive should be given the opportunity of continuing education in the management sciences. (3) Where possible, professional know-how should be incorporated into management policy, or should be made available on a continuing consulting basis. (4) Frank, open dialogue and discussion should be a permanent and continuing feature of the management process between adjacent management levels and among peers. (5) The physical characteristics of the information processing installation—both software as well as hardware—should enable it to pass information up and down the vertical channels of the organizational tree with minimum opportunity for personal selection or interpretation. (6) By the same token, information handling should give maximum consideration to the needs of decision-making nodes in the management process. (7) In a hospital, management includespatient management (the point where clinical management takes over from hospital management actually may be difficult to determine), thus reaching right to the bedside. Information selection, storage, and dissemination functions in the hospital must be designed to ensure maximum compatibility between the requirements of bothbusiness andclinical aspects of management. (8) although in the beginning stages of information system implementation only ‘data’ handling may be possible, the level of sophistication should be raised as quickly as possible; until there is true ‘information’ handling.