Information Systems for Handling Patients' Complaints in Health Organizations

An essential and inherent part of any managerial process is the monitoring and feedback for all the organization's activities. Every organization needs to know if it is acting in an effective way and if its activities are accepted by their recipients the way they are intended to. The handling of complaints is designed to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents in the future and to improve the production of the organization. Furthermore, the handling of complaints from the public is important in tempering the bitter feelings and sense of helplessness of the citizen vis-à-vis bureaucratic systems. One of the various tools available to managers in the organization for obtaining this much needed feedback on the organization's activities is via complaints from the public. The mechanism for handling complaints from the public and responding to them is generally headed by an ombudsman. Managing information received from complaints and transforming it into knowledge in an effective way requires the database to be: complete, up-to-date, versatile and — most importantly — available, accessible, and practical. For this purpose, a computerized system that is both user-friendly and interfaces with existing computerized demographic and other databases already existing in the hospital is essential. This type of information system should also assist in the ongoing administrative management of complaint handling by the ombudsman. In this chapter, we will examine the importance of the ombudsman in public and business organizations in general and in health organizations in particular. The findings presented in this chapter are based on a survey of the literature, on a study we conducted among the ombudsmen and directors of all 26 general hospitals in Israel, and on the authors' cumulative experience in management, in complaint handling and in auditing health systems, as described in case studies. These findings will illustrate how it is possible to exploit a computerized database of public complaints to improve various organizational activities, including upgrading the quality of service provided to patients in hospitals.