Lowering physician hospital resource consumption using low-cost low-technology computing.

Anderson Area Medical Center physicians have been provided disease and procedure specific profiles of their practice experience for more than five years. For four years, physicians were provided reporting, in a variety of formats, detailing their clinical outcomes and consumption of hospital resources in treating patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), pneumonia, cholecystectomy, stroke, congestive heart failure (CHF), and total hip replacement. For the past eighteen months physicians have been provided a uniform format of monthly physician-specific reporting for stroke, AMI, pneumonia, diabetes, CHF, cholecystectomy, total hip replacement, newborn delivery, angina, and hernia repair. Using only a modest PC platform with database, word processing, and graphics programs operating in a DOS environment, an effective disease/procedure reporting program is provided to medical staff with 3 person-days of effort per month.