Improving Health Sector Efficiency
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Improving Health Sector Efficiency

The Role of Information and Communication Technologies

Despite the promise they hold out, implementing information and communication technologies (ICTs) in clinical care has proven to be a very difficult undertaking. More than a decade of efforts provide a picture of significant public investments, resulting in both notable successes and some highly publicised costly delays and failures. This has been accompanied by a failure to achieve widespread understanding among the general public and the medical profession of the benefits of electronic record keeping and information exchange.  

With consistent cross-country information on these issues largely absent, the OECD has used lessons learned from case studies in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United States to identify the opportunities offered by ICTs and to analyse under what conditions these technologies are most likely to result in efficiency and quality-of-care improvements. The findings highlight a number of practices or approaches that could usefully be employed in efforts to improve and accelerate the adoption and use of these technologies.

Publication Date :
28 May 2010
DOI :
10.1787/9789264084612-en
 
Chapter
 

Generating Value from Health ICTs You do not have access to this content

Authors:
OECD
Pages :
31–49
DOI :
10.1787/9789264084612-4-en

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Chapter 1 illustrates the types of benefits that can result from implementation of ICTs. It provides examples of how governments are exploiting these technologies as key building blocks in national health reform strategies and to enable innovation in health care delivery.
Also available in: French