Sustainable technology - sustainability of what?

Why is it that we have started to question the sustainability of consumption, invention and innovation, economy, nation-states, whole systems and even the globe, in short of almost everything? What are the new paradigms, what new approaches have been proposed? And: is it "only" the question to develop new technologies? Lectures given by Peter H. Mettler in Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland Futures Research Centre on 13 March 1997 and in Finnish Ministry of the Environment, Helsinki on 14 March 1997

Supplier Relationship Management im Krankenhaus

Zusammenfassung: Strukturelle Veränderungen des Gesundheitswesens und eine zunehmende Marktdynamik führen dazu, dass sich Krankenhäuser verstärkt um Prozessoptimierung und Kosteneinsparungen bemühen müssen. Eine aktive und differenzierte Gestaltung der Beziehungen zu Lieferanten gewinnt dabei immer mehr an Bedeutung. Die Fallstudie aus dem Universitätsspital Zürich zeigt, dass durch Einführung verschiedener Instrumente des Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) erhebliche Vorteile entstehen können. Aus organisatorischer Sicht kann durch Gründung eines Einkaufsverbunds Markttransparenz geschaffen werden, was später bei Verhandlungen über Preise und Konditionen genutzt werden kann. Aus technischer Sicht kann durch Einführung verschiedener E-Procurement-Tools nicht nur die Effizienz gesteigert, sondern auch die Qualität der Informationen erhöht werden. Dabei profitiert sowohl die Einkaufsabteilung als auch das Pflegepersona

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTH CARE: THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE

In today’s fast changing health care sector, decision makers are facing a growing demand for both clinical and administrative information in order to comply with legal and customer-specific requirements. Performance Management (PM) is thus becoming increasingly important to catch up with the rising informational demands. However, little is known about the PM usage in health care since the constituent research about PM is primarily focussed on the industrial sector. For this purpose, an exploratory survey for the health care sector is presented

Increasing the Networkability of Health Service Providers: The Case of Switzerland

Extensive networking led to a high division of labor among the business partners and to an optimization of cost structures in most sectors of western economies. In competitive parts of the health care markets, the first signs of a similar development are beginning to crystallize. As a consequence, networkability, that is the ability to link up with other players (e.g. specialized health service providers, home care institutions) on the basis of commonly agreed standards for the joint provisioning of patient-centered and cost-efficient health services, will emerge to a key concept for future health service delivery. It is therefore the aim of this contribution to give a first overview of potential enablers for the networkability of health care organizations. In doing so, the discussion of the subject matter is carried out from an interdisciplinary point of view, basing on constituent knowledge of the fields of health services research, organization theory and information systems, and is further substantiated with initial empirical findings from the Swiss health care market

Component-based process modelling in health care

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the health care sector intensify the hospitals’ need for cost-savings and process optimization. A first step is the documentation of processes in order to clarify the actual needs. As in health care processes are rather complex and often different players with divergent demands are involved, a disciplined approach to effectively and efficiently model processes is required. For this purpose, in this contribution a component-based modelling approach is presented and applied