Financial Information Systems and the New Reimbursement Climate

Hospitals that intend to prosper in the new reimbursement climate will increasingly take a proactive posture by anticipating future needs for information and planning accordingly. Human service organizations must become more accountable for the services they provide to society. In mental health, for example, some community mental health centers (CMHCs) are now being asked to do performance contracting, whereby accountability is a multifaced concept related to specific service outcomes and tasks, and negotiated between the involved parties (9). For example, a CMHC might be granted state funds based on the ability of its services to achieve measurable outcomes in such areas as number of admissions, cost per patient, or changes in severity of the patient's illness.

To meet this challenge, financial information systems will need to provide cost-outcome and cost-effectiveness analyses, and sophisticated measures of health status change will need to be incorporated into the financial database (10). Patients will be the ultimate beneficiaries of computerized information systems that are responsive to the demands of the new reimbursement climate.