Principles for Implementing Modularity in Healthcare

Modularity can help address urgent societal needs of cost reductions and improved patient centeredness in healthcare, but has only rarely been implemented in that sector. We propound that this is at least partially due to the lack of guidance on reorganizations of existing healthcare offerings in a modular way. We identify three principles to do so: 1) the service architecture should be decomposable; 2) a proper service specification process should be introduced; and 3) the presence of interfaces should be ensured. Following these principles should help policy makers as well as managers to implement modularity in existing healthcare offerings