Preparing Health Care Processes for IT Integration

Many health care supply chains are now attempting to achieve greater IT integration, between primary and secondary care, as well as internal integration within hospital systems. Conventional theory suggests that these types of initiative should coincide with extensive process reengineering to ensure that the IT fits with organisational processes and the full benefits of the technology are captured as part of the change. However, process reengineering or process redesign within healthcare has not been universally successful for a variety of reasons. In particular, it is widely accepted that healthcare processes are somewhat indeterminate, i.e. processes have not been standardised and are not often repeatable. This paper addresses the issue of what can be done to move towards determinate healthcare processes, so that IT integration stands some chance of helping to contribute to the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the system. Using data from two countries and involving 200 hospitals, the paper addresses the current state of determinacy of processes and explores the potential route towards standardisation. We hypothesise that management paradigms such as “lean thinking” and “masscustomisation” potentially need to be applied to create the right process capability