Health Network Engineering

The growing demand for informational self-determination of patients will not only result in a stronger participation in therapeutic decision making hence causing a change in the physician-patient-relationship, but also require more complex information logistics for health care providers. In this context, a core challenge is the patient identification in a heterogeneous system of diverse ICT solutions. This article presents first approaches how to solve problems arising from insufficient patient identification, both from a single actor's perspective as well as the health network perspective. In a first step, organisation internal as well as cross-organizational mechanisms for patient identification are presented. In a second step, systematic and integrated strategies are discussed. This paper concludes with an outlook on future research questions in this field.

In order to identify and explore the strength and weaknesses of particular organizational designs, a wide range of maturity models have been developed by both, practitioners and academics over the past years. However, a systematization and generalization of the procedure on how to design maturity models as well as a synthesis of design science research with the rather behavioural field of organization theory is still lacking. Trying to combine the best of both fields, a first design proposition of a situational maturity model is presented in this paper. The proposed maturity model design is illustrated with the help of an instantiation for the healthcare domain.

The Swiss health care sector is characterised by a low division of labour and annually rising costs. In order to increase effectiveness and efficiency, other sectors have implemented a high division of labour and extensive networking, in particular through the use of information and communication technologies. In the health care sector initial approaches to networking already exist at the technical level or for the purpose of process optimisation, but holistic approaches are missing. In this article, the authors first show a generic, holistic framework for designing networked structures. Thereafter it is shown how this framework can be transferred to the health care sector and the concept of network-ability – the ability to network with partners quickly and with low setup costs through m:n relationships – is introduced. The article concludes with a description of the procedure for validating and further developing the findings obtained.

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the health care sector intensify the hospitals' needs for cost-savings and process optimization. The adoption of new information and communication technology (ICT) is thereby seen as opportunity to improve not only efficiency and effectiveness but also the quality of health services. As costs for drugs continuously increase, especially hospital pharmacies will be in need of acquiring expertise and technology in order to enhance the sourcing processes. The diffusion of e-procurement is however slow in this area. To investigate why hospital pharmacies only have a modest adoption rate of eprocurement, case studies of three distinct Swiss hospitals with differing organizational structure and automation degrees are presented. It will be shown that technological as well as organizational change is needed in order to efficiently use e-procurement in future.

In the recent years a wide range of generic and domain-specific maturity models (MM) have been developed in order to improve organizational design and learning of healthcare organizations. While many of these studies describe methods on how to measure dedicated aspects of a healthcare organization's maturity, little evidence exists on how to effectively implement and deploy them into practice. This paper therefore delineates the encountered challenges during the design and implementation of three maturity models for distinct improvement areas in hospitals. The findings of this study, on the one hand, may serve as basis for refining existing MM design approaches; on the other hand, it may facilitate further research in domain-specific organizational design with MM.