The Wizard for Hospital Indicator Calculation (the WHIC tool) is a computer application developed by the Hospital Report Research Collaborative to allow Ontario Hospitals to quickly generate hospital specific values for the clinical and financial indicators that appear in the Acute Care and Complex Continuing Care Hospital Report series, as well as values for many of the performance and monitoring indicators used in Ontario's 2006/07 Hospital Accountability Agreements.
WHIC was developed as a proof-of-concept tool. The current version of WHIC (v1.3.3) was released in December 2006 and is the last version that will be developed as part of the Collaborative's initial research strategy.
Working with our hospital users across Ontario, WHIC allowed us to gain valuable insights into how information management tools created around university-led research can be used by hospital providers to monitor and promote excellence in our health system.
Our researchers are currently exploring what the next generation of these tools might look like, and we look forward to engaging with the hospital community as these ideas emerge.
The latest version of WHIC continues to be available for downloading. Please note, that you can delete imported files in WHIC, except for the clinical data text files in the Complex Continuing Care (CCC) module. Please refer to the FAQs, WHIC Web Forum, and Get Documentation section for additional details.
We are very interested in hearing from users of the WHIC Tool. Please provide us with your feedback.