Clinicians and accounting information needs: the role of management control systems as a package

This study investigates the role of management control systems (MCS) as a package to provide clinical managers with cost data coherent with their information needs in public healthcare organizations in Italy. Through a survey and the application of structural equation modelling, the paper explores the effect of both the perceived quality of the cost data received through the accounting information systems, and the economic and managerial training on clinical managers’ perceptions of cost data coherency with their information needs for managing health units. It also investigates the mediating role of the support received from controllers in data interpretation. The results show that meetings between clinicians and controllers contribute increase the perception of cybernetic systems as aligned with clinicians’ information needs, and that can mediate the effect of economic and managerial training toward the alignment of clinicians’ behaviours with organizational objectives. Therefore, the importance of integrating formal and informal MCS emerges.