Business value of IT in healthcare

With the rapid increase of healthcare expenditures and the parallel increase of doubts about the effi ciency 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.