Hospitals sharing services in order to trim their costs.The expected restructuring restructuring - The transformation from one representation form to another at the same relative abstraction level, while preserving the subject system's external behaviour (functionality and semantics). of the health-care system might not be as wrenching for some Northern Ontario Northern Ontario is the part of the province of Ontario which lies north of Lake Huron (including Georgian Bay), the French River and Lake Nipissing. Northern Ontario has a land area of 802,000 km² (310,000 mi²) and constitutes 87% of the land area of Ontario, although it hospitals as one might assume. In larger centres such as Sudbury and North Bay hospitals are rationalizing services and facilities without rationing rationing, allotment of scarce supplies, usually by governmental decree, to provide equitable distribution. It may be employed also to conserve economic resources and to reinforce price and production controls. care. The North Bay Civic Hospital and St. Joseph's General Hospital of North Bay have been sharing laboratory services, diagnostic systems and facilities for nuclear medicine. Louise Johnson, the executive director of St. Joseph's, says the rationalization rationalization, in psychology: see defense mechanism. process is an on-going one, and that the province's current financial crisis merely sped up the process. Meanwhile, Sudbury General Hospital and Sudbury Memorial Hospital are in the initial segment of a five-year program to share a common data bank of patient information and other information. The first portion of the program, implemented at the end of 1990, included information from the two hospitals' admissions and human resources The fancy word for "people." The human resources department within an organization, years ago known as the "personnel department," manages the administrative aspects of the employees. departments. The second segment, which went on line last May, involved laboratory data. The third segment merged data from the hospitals' pharmacies last fall. Data utilized by the radiology radiology, branch of medicine specializing in the use of X rays, gamma rays, radioactive isotopes, and other forms of radiation in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. and nursing departments will be added later this year. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Michael Rennie, the director of systems support at General Hospital, a primary reason for the system's creation is that patients use both hospitals and "this is a way for the doctors at both hospitals to access a patient's relevant medical history." Rennie says the system, which utilizes five mini-computers each capable of driving approximately 200 computer terminals, also allows the departments within a single hospital to share information. Rennie estimates that the computer system will save the hospitals approximately $2 million annually when it is fully implemented. For example, the system has made it possible to merge the operations of the hospitals' pharmacies under one director. |
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