Nicole Gerber
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Title: IT service catalogue for hospitals
Biography
Biography: Nicole Gerber
Abstract
Statement of the Problem: Like in other industries, digitalization causes increased dependency on IT Services in hospitals. In healthcare, IT as a discipline and IT as departments were often seen more as a necessary evil than as an enabler or partner in the past. In hospitals, this firstly led to an unaligned, redundant, hard to maintain and thus costly development of the IT infrastructure and software landscape with many legacy systems and secondly to unclear service provisions without clear service level agreements and non-transparent pricing. Particularly with increasing cost pressure and higher need of compliance and risk management, IT departments in hospitals need clear IT Service Catalogues in order to provide the specific services needed and also in order to have more transparency of cost.
Methodology & Theoretical Orientation and Findings: In an iterative, consortial research approach including a University of Applied Sciences, consulting firms and several hospital IT experts, an IT Service Catalogue for Hospitals was developed based on existing literature but adding specific aspects for the hospital context. The main goal was a pragmatic approach in order to ensure implementation in practice.
Conclusion & Significance: The IT Service Catalogue for Hospitals provides a good practice standard for IT departments in hospitals taking into account the specific needs for the hospital industry and thus enables hospitals to do benchmarking due to the common understanding and definition of the catalogued services.