How can we help health managers, clinicians, technologists, health policy makers and researchers work together to enable the better use of IT to support the management of healthcare organizations of all types. Contact Dr Chris Bain if you have any suggestions

Welcome to the first international web site dedicated to the evolving specialty of Health - MIC: Healthcare Management Informatics and Computing (Health - MIC - pronounced "Health MIKE"). We also have a discussion group available for interested professionals - please see the link on the right if you are interested in joining. This discussion group is designed to advance health management (vs clinical) informatics by acting as a forum for communication between technologists, vendors, researchers, clinicians and health managers with an interest in improving the management of healthcare organizations of all types through the better use of IT. Members come from across the Australasian region including Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, as well as Europe and the US; to try and address the needs of Healthcare Management Informatics and Computing ("Health MIKE").

What do we hope to achieve?

We hope to address some of the following questions:

1. what are the key information requirements of healthcare managers, be they GP practice managers or senior hospital executives?
2. what are the decision support requirements of these same groups? 
3. what are the change management issues inherent in implementing management information solutions?
4. how do we harness some of the groundbreaking work in scheduling, forecasting and other problem areas happening in pockets, often in research environments. In particular, how can such innovations be operationalized and /or incorporated into robust, integrated IT systems?
5. how do we represent management concepts such as "occupancy" and "congestion" for example - in a way that IT practitioners and developers can incorporate them into practical IT systems - eg - through the use of archetypes (openEHR) or other kinds of modelling environments? Even more fundamentally are questions of common definitions of "occupancy", "congestion", "capacity" etc - some definitions exist, but how widespread is agreement around them?
6. how do we engage funders sufficiently for them to see that management, and by inference patient care (eg - through improved access, cost containment where possible), can be improved signifcantly (and in particular can become more evidence based) through the utilization of relevant management technologies?
7. how do we ensure that HR, finance, PAS and predictive systems can work in an interoperable fashion given the complex and intertwined relationships between issues such as staffing, finance and bed management in healthcare organizations?

11/07/08 - health-mic website - significant upgrade

07/07/08 - SHMIC Membership has hit 62 in the Australasian region

26/06/08 - SHMIC Membership hits 50  

SHMIC Discussion Group