Abstract
Sustainability, as a science, is the guideline of the present work. It aims to analyse, by means of a literature review, various areas of healthcare in which information technology (IT) has been- or could be-used, leading to several sources of sustainability, for example, cost savings, better teamwork, higher quality and efficiency of medical care. After a brief introduction analysing the strategic contexts in which innovation in general, and IT in particular, can be a source of general improvements in efficiency, cost savings and service quality, the research focuses on the healthcare system by discussing the different nature of private and public organizations in terms of adopting innovations and changes and discussing the issue of consumer health costs and consumer choices. The following part focuses on the qualitative benefits of IT in healthcare and discusses the importance of metrics for measuring performance, costs and efficiency in this area. The work then qualitatively introduces a new set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), partly based on literature from different topics and existing and validated sets of metrics, analysing, under the point of view of sustainability, the implementation of IT in healthcare, namely in management, organization, technology, environment and social fields (HHC-MOTES framework). The model, inspired by and to sustainability, can be used as a decision support at the strategic management level as well as for the analysis and investigation of the effects of IT systems in the healthcare sector from various perspectives.
Highlights
This paper presents a novel set of metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI), the HHC-MOTES framework, which is intended for the qualitative and possibly quantitative measurement of the various aspects related to sustainability, in the broader sense, of information technology (IT) applications in healthcare
The question research of the present work was to understand, by means of literature review and case studies, whether and how the introduction of IT could be regarded as a source of sustainability
The question research of the present work was to understand, by means of literature review and case studies, whether and how the introduction of IT could be regarded as a source of sustainability for healthcare and, in which areas and domains
Summary
Sustainability in different fields-namely: managerial, organizational, technological, environmental and social—is the guideline of this research, which concerns the impact, on these areas, of the adoption of IT in healthcare and presents a new set of metrics for the evaluation of this specific issue. Information technology (IT) is described as the collection, processing and storage of data by a computer-based product [22], while Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a term that adds a third dimension to IT, by integrating telecommunications along with computers and data management software, to enable users to store, manipulate and transfer information from one point to another [23,24,25] Both IT and ICT are often regarded as innovative when applied to businesses and organizations [26,27], since they tend to deeply change the way in which resources work, enterprises compete and since they usually require some sort of process reengineering [28,29]. Since quantitative testing of the framework has not yet been carried out, the implications are largely theoretical but the model can already provide guidance for healthcare policy makers and stakeholders, for example, in the selection of the right information systems and/or in improving existing systems and/or in the search for limits or competitive advantages and/or in the selection of areas to be prioritized
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