Value delivery through IT-based healthcare architectures

The competiveness of the healthcare industry increasingly hinges on the strategic competence to create value for patients, insurance companies, employees and investors, alike under conditions of hyper-turbulence (Braun von Reinersdorff, 2007). While in the past public healthcare institutions took advantage of strong national regulation regimes, free-wheeling market forces in European service sectors will take on added significance and endanger entrenched business models (Olmsted Teisberg, 2007). To make things worse, the demographic changes towards geriatric societies and ensuing chronic diseases may cause a financial collapse of national healthcare institutions, which are anything, but adaptive and robust (Porter and Teisberg, 2004). Given scarce healthcare resources facing an inflating demand for medical treatment, healthcare companies should harness the value potential of IT-induced process innovations. Instead of launching medical ‘rocket science’ output innovations, sometimes even missing evidence criteria due to their early-stage status, healthcare companies will be forced to adopt core elements of the industrial production paradigm (Braun von Reinersdorff, 2007).