ABSTRACT
Since the early 1980s, hospital information systems (HISs) have steadily grown in popularity. At present, nearly every acute-care hospital in the United States has at least some form of HIS, which at a minimum performs administrative tasks such as patient billing, accounting, and employee payroll tracking. Depending on the size of the hospital, an information system may initially cost from several hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars. Although hospitals face a wide array of budget challenges and potential cutbacks, hospitals are still expected to increase spending on information technology (IT). According to Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics™ (2009), hospitals are estimated to spend 43 percent to 48 percent of their capital budgets on IT, growing at a rate of approximately 7.5 percent per year, due in large part to federal incentives and conversion to the International Classification of Diseases-Tenth Edition Clinical Module (ICD-10-CM) diagnostic coding system. Consequently, it is critical that such a system produce a positive return on investment (ROI) through patient care quality improvements, increases in organizational efficiency, or enhanced negotiating power with
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................97 Overview of System Architectures ..................................................................................................98 Functional Overview of Hospital Information Systems ..................................................................98
