Assessing the Use of Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to Support Decision-Making: A Cross-Sectional Study in Public Hospitals in the Huíla Health Region of Southern Angola

Abstract

Hospital information systems could be relevant tools to inform hospital managers, support better management decisions in healthcare, and increase efficiency. Nonetheless, hospital managers’ effective use of these systems to support decision-making in Angola is unknown. Our study aimed to analyse the use of hospital information systems as a tool to support decision-making by hospital managers in Huíla, Angola. It was a descriptive, cross-sectional study inducted between July and September 2017 in seven hospitals in Huíla Province, Angola, specifically in the cities of Lubango and Matala. Thirty-six members of the hospital boards filled out a self-questionnaire that consisted of twenty questions based on the following issues: Characterisation of the interviewee’s profile; availability of information in the institution; and quality and usefulness of the available operational information. At least two thirds of the participants reported being unsatisfied or relatively satisfied with each assessed hospital information systems-specific feature. More than 50% have rarely or never used the health information system to support decision-making. Most managers do not use hospital information systems to support management-related decision-making in Angola. Improving the ability of hospital information systems to compute adequate indicators and training for hospital managers could be targets for future interventions to support better management-related decision-making in Angolan healthcare.

Factors of Increasing Intention to Use Information Systems

“…Some of the problems that occur due to the not optimal use of hospital management information systems are, there is often a vacancy in drug stocks and medicinal raw materials in pharmaceutical installations, incompatibility of inpatient room availability data with realization, and the patient's medical record data is confused, causing errors in medical procedures. Based on these problems, it appears that health workers are not maximizing the use of hospital management information systems as a source of accurate information which will avoid poor quality services for patients, because management information systems are a trusted source of information and inform data in real time (Sanjuluca et al, 2022) and management information systems prevent errors in patient medical handlers (Arora & Ikbal, 2023).…”

Design and Implementation of a Comprehensive AI Dashboard for Real-Time Prediction of Adverse Prognosis of ED Patients

“…It is therefore vital to make real-time, personalized, and accurate disease predictions in the ED. Unfortunately, the support of the hospital information system (HIS) for clinical decision-making is still insufficient [ 1 ]. Although many ED decision support systems (DSS) have been proposed [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ], they are mostly research-oriented and have not been adopted for clinical use.…”