Identity Management for Health Professionals: A Method for the Integration ofResponsibility, Organization, and IT

As a result of growing economic pressures, collaborations and process orientation are rapidly gaining importance for hospitals. With organisation and software landscapes which have grown over time in line with specific professional groups and functions, the paradigm shift places high demands on integration. One of the key challenges in this context is the hospital-wide management of medical staff identities along patient processes. Effective identity management calls for technical means (e.g. for exchanging user data between applications), organisational definitions (e.g. HR processes for starts, departures and changes of hospital medical staff) and regulated responsibilities (e.g. for role definitions). The article shows that while the technical solutions do exist in practice, the necessary prerequisites are frequently missing where organisation and responsibility are concerned. The changes linked with meeting those prerequisites are likely to affect the work of medical staff and can encounter resistance. A very cautious approach is required to the apparently "technical” task of establishing a system of identity management. The article presents a procedure model which has been put to the test in practice. It ensures that responsibility and authority for identity management are successively installed in line with the specific circumstances that prevail in hospital

Identity Management for Health Professionals - A Method for the Integration of Responsibility, Organization, and IT

As a result of growing economic pressures, collaborations and process orientation are rapidly gaining importance for hospitals. With organisation and software landscapes which have grown over time in line with specific professional groups and functions, the paradigm shift places high demands on integration. One of the key challenges in this context is the hospital-wide management of medical staff identities along patient processes. Effective identity management calls for technical means (e.g. for exchanging user data between applications), organisational definitions (e.g. HR processes for starts, departures and changes of hospital medical staff) and regulated responsibilities (e.g. for role definitions). The article shows that while the technical solutions do exist in practice, the necessary prerequisites are frequently missing where organisation and responsibility are concerned. The changes linked with meeting those prerequisites are likely to affect the work of medical staff and can encounter resistance. A very cautious approach is required to the apparently “technical” task of establishing a system of identity management. The article presents a procedure model which has been put to the test in practice. It ensures that responsibility and authority for identity management are successively installed in line with the specific circumstances that prevail in hospitals

Towards assessing the networkability of health care providers: a maturity model approach

This paper presents a networkability maturity model as an approach to assess a health care organisation's capacity with regards to being able to efficiently engage in business relationships. Continuously rising costs and increasingly restrained budgets for health care put pressure on the public health systems. A low division of labour and integration of processes along cross-organisational patient therapy provides large potential for improvements in efficiency and efficacy. It is the aim of the presented model to enable identification of potentials for improvements and respective measures to advance the ability to benefit from specialisation and collaboration along the value chain. The presented model is developed based on a classification of related state-of-the-art in maturity models to assess individual factors of networkability which are integrated to form an overall framework comprising six components and respective factors to be assessed. As networkability maturity addresses the interrelation of strategy, organisational design and information systems design, the paper adheres to requirements for effective design science research applied to the process of construction of a networkability maturity model applicable for health care providers. It therefore concludes with a case-based evaluation according to the design research literature and identification of further researc

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

Mission Impossible? Exploring the Limits of Managing Large IT Projects and Ways to Cross the Line

For decades much effort has been made to improve project management capabilities. Still, the failure rate remains high, especially for large IT projects. Our postmortem analysis of 15 large IT projects of the Swiss Federal Administration, with an accumulated loss of one billion U.S. dollars, shows that while project management deficits account for some of the failures, project failure is primarily caused by poor project governance capabilities. Based on insights gained from the initial failure analysis, the Swiss Federal Government decided to assess all its large IT projects based on our co-designed framework. Meanwhile, also private companies have assessed IT projects applying our framework. As a consequence, valuable discussions and measures have been initiated and sporadically projects were stopped. The data gained by these assessments will allow to identify patterns that promise to be a reference for governance actors and bodies what information to ask for, when to intervene, and how