Selecting a labor information system. What to ask, what to avoid.

Payroll expenses may account for over half of all of a hospital's expenses. Manual time card processing requires an abundance of staff time and can often result in costly errors. To alleviate this problem, many healthcare facilities are implementing computerized labor information systems. To minimize the risk of selecting the wrong system, hospital administrators should ask the following questions before committing to any computerized labor information system: Is the software designed for hospital use and easily adaptable to each hospital's unique policies? How flexible is the software's reporting system? Does it include automatic scheduling that creates generic schedules? Does the system have the capability of securing time and attendance records and documenting the audit trail? Does the system include an accurate and reliable badge reader? What type of hardware is best for the particular hospital--microcomputer, minicomputer, or mainframe? Finally, to guarantee successful software installation, the vendor should have extensive experience and documentation in the system's implementation.