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STRATEGY, IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION 161<br />

PRIORITIES FOR THE INFORMATION<br />

MANAGEMENT AND FINANCIAL PRECONDITIONS<br />

The previous paragraph listed what should happen as far as ambition and<br />

necessity are concerned. This deliberately did not consider the financial aspects.<br />

Neither was a ranking of importance made for the desired projects and activities.<br />

In all probability, however, an initial tally of the necessary manpower and<br />

finances for executing the projects and activities will produce figures above<br />

those reserved by the health care organization for information management. Two<br />

questions then arise: how large should the health care organization’s expenditure<br />

be on information management, and what ranking principle can be applied to the<br />

sequence of projects and activities?<br />

Financing, not budgeting<br />

How large the expenditure on information management should be, should ideally<br />

be determined by the expected returns. The tally of business cases (determined<br />

per project/activity) determines the IT expenditure in a multi-year estimate.<br />

Unfortunately, the returns of PCISs can only partly be expressed in economic<br />

terms. Benefits include the increase in effectiveness of care, and the satisfaction<br />

of patients and care professionals (see also Chapter 11). The quality, speed and<br />

scope of information provision should improve, after all. Also, there are<br />

intangible benefits, such as being a front-line organization, and/or being an<br />

attractive organization for care professionals and researchers to work. In addition,<br />

the organizational impact and process changes associated with IT<br />

implementation make it difficult to calculate a simple economic yield (see<br />

Chapter 11).<br />

Listing the tangible and intangible information management benefits must be<br />

undertaken, however. No matter how imperfect, it provides a footing for the<br />

discussion on the funds to be channelled to information management.<br />

Simultaneously, comparative data from other information-intensive industries<br />

are helpful in the strategic discussion on the percentage of the budget that should<br />

be devoted to information management. <strong>Information</strong>-intensive, for-profit<br />

companies currently spend approximately 12 per cent of their annual costs on IT.<br />

The expenditure by hospitals, for example, is far below this; between 2 per cent<br />

and 4 per cent. For other health care organizations, these numbers are generally<br />

even lower. These figures make clear that health care organizations—a highly<br />

information-intensive industry, after all! —can benefit from pro-actively drawing<br />

up a multi-year budget that takes account of rising expenditures for information<br />

management. (The expectation of a rise in expenditures can also be built bottomup,<br />

by making a forward projection based on the expansion of the number of<br />

users, expansion of functionality, and replacement of existing systems.)

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