Balanced Scorecard or Business Intelligence?

Information systems (IS) have been playing a central role in the health sector. With different management practices between the public and private health sector, the management of public health institutions have been adopting a contextual and contingent logic, based on circumstantial factors and without a defined strategic vision. Particularly in the financial field, the activities have focused on the administration of the State Budget revenues, showing a weak concern with the efficiency of the public resources management. Often faced with budget breakdowns, management has sought to justify the systematic increase in budget overruns in spending on the resources involved in providing public health services. The problems and the recent budgetary difficulties of the economy in Portugal, especially the urgent need to control expenditure growth, which exposed the need for a new paradigm for management in public health institutions. A major challenge, driven by the Health Ministry that supervises this economic sector, refers to the pressure for the development of IS to management decision support systems which helps to understand and become visible and understandable decisions in these organizations. This requirement has resulted in a strong investment in information and communication technologies in the context of clear architectural difficulties relating to integration of existing SI. This work intends to begin the analysis of IS for management decision support health systems in hospitals, trying to identify the best strategy and solution to be adopted based on the latest solutions available in the market, including Balanced Scorecard and Business Intelligence. To this end, we have focused our study at Hospital Center of Setubal.