Clinical information systems: cornerstone for an efficient hospital management

The university hospitals of Geneva are the largest consortium of public hospitals in Switzerland. This organization is born in 1995, after a political decision to merge the seven public and teaching hospitals of the Canton of Geneva. From an information technologies perspective, it took several years to reach a true unified vision of the complete organization. The clinical information system is deployed in all sites covering in- and outpatient cares. It is seen as the cornerstone of information management and flow in the organization, for direct patient care and decision support, but also for the management to drive, improve and leverage the activities, for better efficiency, quality and safety of care, but also to drive processes. As the system has become more important for the organization, it has required progressive changes in its governance. The high importance of interoperability and use of formal representation has become a major challenge in order to be able to reuse clinical information for real-time care and management activities, and for secondary usage such as billing, resource management, strategic planning and clinical research. This paper proposes a short overview of the tools allowing to leverage the management for physicians, nurses, human resources and hospital governance.