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Business Value of IT in Healthcare

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Lean Thinking for Healthcare

Part of the book series: Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age ((Healthcare Delivery Inform. Age))

Abstract

With the rapid increase of healthcare expenditures and the parallel increase of doubts about the efficiency of current healthcare systems, due to increasing number of medical incidents and problems, decision- and policy-makers in healthcare industry have started looking for adopting new management practices and strategies to reduce costs and increase healthcare quality, in other words, maximizing the value and minimizing waste. Investing more on information technology has been one of these new strategies. At the same time, lean thinking and Lean Six Sigma promises have been appealing for healthcare, after achieving good results in different industries. However, due to its uniqueness, healthcare industry should have its own definition of “value” as it extends this concept beyond the operational level to cover sociotechnical aspects. Thus, the role that information technology can play to facilitate business value, and later value, in healthcare is discussed in this chapter. Also, lean and Lean Six Sigma in healthcare and their link to business value of IT are to be discussed, on a quest to draw a road map to better IT investments in healthcare to improve value generating in this industry.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business IT and Logistics, RMIT University, 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Peter Haddad

  2. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, RMIT University, 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Mark Gregory

  3. Epworth HealthCare & Department of BITL & HIRi, RMIT University, 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Nilmini Wickramasinghe Ph.D., M.B.A.

Authors
  1. Peter Haddad
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  2. Mark Gregory
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  3. Nilmini Wickramasinghe Ph.D., M.B.A.
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Correspondence to Nilmini Wickramasinghe Ph.D., M.B.A. .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT University, School of Business Information Technolog, Melbourne VIC, Australia

    Nilmini Wickramasinghe

  2. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia

    Latif Al-Hakim

  3. Department of Urology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Chris Gonzalez

  4. DeGroote School Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Joseph Tan

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Haddad, P., Gregory, M., Wickramasinghe, N. (2014). Business Value of IT in Healthcare. In: Wickramasinghe, N., Al-Hakim, L., Gonzalez, C., Tan, J. (eds) Lean Thinking for Healthcare. Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8036-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8036-5_5

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