Engineering a Performance Management System to Support Community Care Delivery

The engineering of health information technology (HIT) often focuses on clinical or hospital focused tasks. As more care is provided in the community there is an increasing need to monitor goals of care related to patient care delivery. These goals are often measured through performance metrics. Before we can track performance metrics we need to articulate the data and processes that define the metrics. However, the data sources are often varied and the processes ill-defined making it hard to engineer systems to collect and analyze metrics. Further, the ability to share data between organizations is impacted by culture, technology and privacy issues. To date there are few methodological approaches for modeling a health system from the perspective of metrics, data sources, and touch points to enable performance management of community based healthcare delivery. This paper addresses those shortcomings and presents a methodology for modeling goals, metrics and data to enable engineering of business intelligence applications for performance management of community based care.