Managing care through managing information: are we headed in the right direction?

Healthcare organizations adopt HIMS to manage the large amount of data available in the patient medical record. The CPR, however, must be more than a mirror image of the paper record to yield analyzable data necessary to answer the consumer's questions about cost and quality of care. Although organizations strive to achieve standardization of medical recording required for analysis, they must also be attuned to factors necessary to achieve end-user compliance and comfort with data input. The closer organizations move to ease of conversion to computerized medical records, the further they may be moving away from data integrity. What is more, the optimal balance point may be different for each organization.