WinSIG
WinSIG is a Management Information System for Windows developed by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to better respond to current approaches and emerging practices in health services management. WinSIG is designed to aid in the management of efficiency and quality, the allocation of resouces based on social productivity criteria, cost containment, and payment of services. WinSIG provides functions to easily analyze the relevance, efficacy, and quality of production; to negotiate and monitor management agreements; to analyze costs; and to perform billing functions. This is achieved through modules to process the morbidity attended, to set up treatment protocols, to use diagnostics related groups, and to cost services. The system, which is used throughout the region of the Americas, is thus optimally designed to be adaptable to national conditions and offers comparative advantages to meet the countries' needs.
The main purpose of WinSIG is to provide managers with an analytical decision-making tool for the productive management process of the health systems in the Region of the Americas. Its chief contribution is not in generating new information, but in selectively integrating existing information in order to supply the manager with a strategic vision for the administration of health facilities or systems.
WinSIG is not an all encompassing solution for solving problems in the management of health systems and services; these are beyond the scope of any one instrument. It is a management methodology that helps generate the new institutional and managerial culture that is characteristic of public administration reform. It focuses on social productivity and it allows for transparency concerning relevant problems and for accountability.
It is important to understand the double purpose of WinSIG as both a tool and a process. As a tool it provides information essential to decision-making, with a comprehensive vision of the health services offered, but with selective strategies for targeted intervention in critical areas of productive management. As such, WinSIG is a method to select and integrate critical components of different information subsystems in order to provide an overall vision of the organization or network of organizations, to detect critical problems (those with a greater qualitative and quantitative impact on services and on costs), and to rationalize the use of resources as well as to improve and increase production.
The use of WinSIG's components (managerial dashboards, indicators, etc.) generates a change in process which promotes advancements in managerial decision making compatible with established paradigms for the modernization of public management and health sector reform. Though WinSIG is not a panacea for solving all the management of health systems and services, it directly touches many of the fundamental problems of health services organization and management. Interaction with other tools--for programming, for quality assurance, for functional analysis and for performance evaluation--increase and complement its potential.
WinSIG provides the necessary tools for managers to:
- Comprehensively evaluate performance of health institutions, service networks, and programs;
- Identify the most salient factors or the most relevant problems of an institution's productivity profile;
- Facilitate analysis of these factors or problems in order to determine options for change;
- Monitor the change processes and assess the impact of institutional adjustment measures adopted to address problems that identifiable problems;
- Establish the costs of services in terms of productivity functions.
The following products are available:
- Up-to-date monthly information for management, including managerial charts, management indicators and trends. It provides a set of indicators for results monitoring. These indicators quantify coverage, production, resources, performance, and costs.
- A module for processing structure of morbidity attended, following the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).
- A module for designing treatment protocols as an auxiliary element of quality assurance programs that is linked to the structure of morbidity and the inputs and procedures programming modules.
- A programming and budgeting tool, based on an analysis of institutional capacity and treatment protocols, that provides solid options to set production goals as well as establishing the requirements for therapeutic, diagnostic and other procedures, and of essential supplies.
- A mechanism for costing of treatments, additional to conventional average costs --total and unitary costs--, that includes two modalities: presumptive costs, stemming from the treatment protocols by related diagnoses group and current cost, either per patient or per procedure, facilitating individual collections or inter-institutional billing.
- Schemes for evaluating the productivity and for institutional efficiency based on comparison of results against programmed activities. The schemes compare services rendered with protocols, actual costs against presumed costs, and real production capacity against potential capacity.
- A mechanism to form and compare Diagnostic Related Groups (DRGs) based on the costs of care included in the protocol and the actual costs of the care given.
- An on-screen consultation system to define, formulate, and interpret indicators (conditioning factors, implications, etc.) that WinSIG uses in the institutional management process, as well as in the contents of the defined treatment protocols.
The WinSIG program must be installed, for stand-alone or LAN, on the hard drive of an IBM-compatible computer, with the Windows 95 operating system or higher, Microsoft Office 97 or higher, and with 64 MB of RAM and a parallel port printing option. In order to obtain reasonably efficient execution times a processing speed of 100 MHz or higher and a computer processor Pentium II or higher are recommended. Installation of the program requires a minimum of 120 MB of free space on the hard drive and additional disk space for the databases, which expand as the system is used.
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