trol, should be experienced or empo

trol, should be experienced or empowered towards the
typical ‘administrative’ ways of dealing with the MIS.
Third, as these different backgrounds have such different
implications, CEOs with a balanced background
may be most effective to confront pressures towards
both cost reduction and quality enhancement. This
implies not only that CEOs obtain a larger repertoire in
theways they manage the organization, but also that the
information provided by the hospital’s MIS supports
this repertoire in full. Here, investment in additional
reports that combine and integrate various kinds of clinical
and administrative information may be beneficial.
This in turn requires and allows, fourth, that clinical and
financial information is used more at the various hierarchical
levels within the organization, and in combined
fashions as to integrate the clinical and administrative
needs. In terms of general leadership, this may require
that CEOs spur clinicians at other levels to understand
and formulate their own information demands, and to
clarify what these demands mean for the design of
the hospital’s MIS. Thus, hospital’s top managers may
have to actively stimulate dialogue among clinicians
and administrators to ‘demystify’ the MIS and make it
more broadly owned. This requires that CEOs apply a
style of supervision that stimulates agreement with the
relevant professional staff about desirable financial and
non-financial controls for monitoring, which will not
‘erode’ professional (clinical) discretion unnecessarily,
and that balances the need to provide management
with performance feedback while establishing control
boundaries within which professional discretion can be
exercised [25,26,27]. This also requires that CEOs realize
the importance of the relationship between information
management and the accomplishment of the
hospital’s strategic objectives [44,45]. All this, finally,
may require that the hospital’s board of directors, who
are responsible for appointing hospital CEOs, will pay
increased attention to the proper balance between CEO
characteristics and the strategic needs of the hospital.