Improving health services via the Web

Hong Kong Hospital Authority uses SAS Web reporting for faster information delivery Established in 1990, Hong Kong's Hospital Authority is a statutory body responsible for all public hospitals and specialist outpatient clinics in the territory. At present, it manages over 26,000 hospital beds and nearly 50,000 full time staff. Like many other similar organizations worldwide, the Hospital Authority faces ever-higher expectations in the community, an aging population, and rising costs of health care. SAS data management and analysis tools have been in use in the Hospital Authority for a number of years, allowing reports and analysis to be generated for senior management and clinicians for service reviews, management reports and disease based analysis. "A simple example of how these reports can help us to improve our service is a recent analysis done on the daily admissions to our hospitals," says Edwina Shung, senior statistician at the Hospital Authority. "We found that the number of admissions, both from clinical referrals and from our Accident and Emergency Service on Mondays was consistently higher than on any other day of the week. This piece of information enables the management to diagnose problems and rethink on other strategies so as to reduce the problem of overcrowding in hospitals in peak season." SAS software is used as an essential tool in the Patient Related Group (PRG) analyses, which allow the Hospital Authority to carry out analysis on patients according to their diagnosis and clinical management. Information on each patient is tracked such as the hospitals visited, the surgery or other treatment administered, co morbidities, length of stay, and their readmission pattern. With this information clinicians can better understand the management paths and various process and outcome indicators for different disease groups. Another use for SAS software is within the Clinical Management System, which gives doctors access to information relating to their particular hospital via the Information Delivery System. Towards the end of 1999, the Hospital Authority tried out its reporting functions on clinical information using SAS/IntrNet software. "People may not prefer hard copies of reports nowadays. By supplying reports on the Web they can have fast, easy access to the most up to date information whenever they need it," explains Edwina Shung. "The main reason for choosing SAS was the fact that it provides a complete end-to-end solution," adds Kelvin Poon, statistician in the Statistics and Health Information Section of the Hospital Authority. "There are really four components to the system we put in place - data management, statistical analysis, reporting and information delivery. Other vendors can provide one or two of these components but SAS can provide all four, with powerful integration between each step. It's also easier to manage. Our staff only have to learn one program language to complete different areas of tasks. There is also no problem in converting data from one application to another." The Hospital Authority is looking further to improve its PRG system in the future with the implementation of a Multi-Dimensional Database (MDDB) server. "This will allow us to store PRG data in cubes so that users can retrieve information faster and more easily and use On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools for analysis," says Kelvin Poon.