Over the past decade there has been a tremendous spread of computerized systems in hospitals. The advancement provided an opportunity for hospitals to gain access to computerized clinical, financial, and statistical data. Case costing information is the integration of clinical, financial, and statistical data to provide costing information at the patient level. Ontario Case Costing Initiative (OCCI) is an undertaking of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC). This chapter focuses on the implementation of case costing using OCCI as a guideline for a hospital. It addresses the process of implementation by discussing proposals for planning, implementing, transitioning, and evaluation of case costing. The adoption of the OCCI allows health care professionals to analyze integrated health information and further enables evidence-based decision making.
TopIntroduction
Over the past decade, there has been a tremendous spread of computerized systems in hospitals. The advancement provided an opportunity for hospitals to gain access to computerized clinical, financial, and statistical data.
Clinical data sources include all the medical data such as patient records, laboratory results and others which are needed for health service delivery to the patients (Mettler & Vimarlund, 2009). Administrative data sources contain all the business data, which includes statistical data, and financial data, which are required for running the organization (Mettler et al, 2009). The integration of clinical, financial and statistical data provides the opportunity for hospitals to present case costing information at the patient level. Ontario Case Costing Initiative (OCCI) is an undertaking of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC). The primary goals of the OCCI are the collection of case costing data in support of improved management decision making and the development of hospital funding methodologies (OCCI, 2012).
As the health care system evolves, health care providers are finding themselves under increasing levels of financial risk for effective patient management, while at the same time being held more accountable for demonstrating their ability to provide and document appropriate cost-effective high quality care (Rosenstein, 1999). In order to accomplish this objective, providers have taken dramatic steps in collaborating informatic information applications to allocate patient specific case costing data to identify opportunities to improve patient outcomes. The successful implementation of the OCCI necessitates appropriate people with committed resources, information access, and technical support.
This chapter will focus on the implementation of case costing using OCCI as a guideline for a hospital. The objective of this chapter is to address the process of implementation by discussing proposals for planning, implementing, transitioning, and evaluation of case costing. The adoption of the OCCI will allow health care professionals to analyze integrated health information and will further enable evidence-based decision-making.