Evaluation of ICT investment in healthcare: Insights and agenda for future research

The recent downturn in global economy exerts mounting pressure on the justification of ICT budgets within organizations. Effective evaluation of ICT investments is therefore deterministic of organizations' ability to maximize the business value to be extracted from such investments. The same can be said for healthcare institutions. Increasingly, healthcare institutions are pressured to optimize ICT investments for improving patient care. Yet, extant literature is fragmented on the focal concepts to be utilized for ICT evaluations in healthcare. By conducting a systematic literature review of 99 scholarly articles that have been published between 2003 and 2008, this study endeavors to shed light on contemporary theoretical and methodological trends that are pertinent to ICT evaluations in healthcare. Based on our literature review, three main findings are noted. First, we detect a gradual progression of ICT evaluation methods from the conventional standard of random controlled trial (RCT) to mixed-methods and triangulation. This, in turn, translates to a greater diversity of constructs being utilized for ICT evaluation and an expansion in operationalization techniques for measurement purposes. Second, we identified the five most important stakeholders and evaluative dimensions to be included in the ICT evaluation process. Together, these identified stakeholders and evaluative dimensions represent core elements to be incorporated into ICT evaluations in healthcare such that evaluations can be undertaken in an informative and purposeful fashion. Third, we identified several distinctive contextual characteristics of the healthcare sector that deserve further research. These characteristics include the multi-stakeholder environment, the industry's emphasis on safety as well as the knowledge intensive nature and handcrafted type of work being performed. This study enriches extant literature by synthesizing findings from past studies to glean insights into relevant concepts for ICT evaluation in healthcare and propose an agenda for future research along this direction