Networkability in the Health Care Sector - Necessity, Measurement and Systematic Development as the Prerequisites for Increasing the Operational Efficiency of Administrative Processes

The 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 IT. In the health care sector, however, networking is only progressing at a very slow pace and not along a wide front. While initial approaches to networking already exist at the technical level or for the purpose of process optimisation, holistic approaches are missing. In this article, the authors first show how a generic, holistic framework for designing networked structures can be transferred to the health care sector. Then the concept of networkability and its design objects are introduced. In order to assess networkability, the use of development levels for design objects is proposed so that a maturity stage model can be derived on this basis for the various players in the health care sector. Thereafter the results of an expert workshop regarding the main design objects which determine networkability in the health care sector are presented. The article concludes with a description of the procedure for validating and further developing the findings obtained.