Conceptualizing the business value of IT in healthcare to design sustainable e-health solutions.

Abstract

Today we are witnessing many initiatives to design and implement IT solutions to support superior healthcare delivery. Key stakeholders including policy makers, healthcare practitioners and patients are all agreed that effective, efficient quality healthcare delivery is vital and that IT has a critical role in effecting value driven healthcare delivery. However, to date it would appear that the promised value from IT in healthcare is eluding us. We believe that this is related in part to the fact that we do not have appropriate frameworks and models that capture the business value of IT in healthcare and thus we set out to develop an appropriate framework to address this void. The proffered model is derived from an in depth analysis of multi-spectral literature from various fields including IS, economics computer science and healthcare as this paper serves to outline.