Refining resource management in healthcare delivery processes: Should we look at technology changes another way?

Abstract

Abstract

Background: Today's health organizations are under increasing pressure to meet a range of sometimes conflicting, often divisive goals. Consequently, they need to maximize the value created for patients as an overarching goal. Value can be addressed through organizational processes managed through activities, actors and resources. Managers perceive this interaction process mainly through resource and cost dimensions. However, the extent of the change in resources, i.e. the change in value creation caused by a new technology, has not yet been investigated.

Purpose: In our study, we examine the consequences of technological alterations resulting in a change regarding resources that impact value creation. We seek to describe the change patterns in resource compositions that occur when introducing a new technology into an organizational process.

Study design/methodology/approach: We adopted a case study method with a process perspective, where we applied the Time-Driven Activity-based Costing (TDABC) framework to capture the managerial perspective on cost and resource management related to value creation. Five healthcare protocols implemented using different technologies (face-to-face and telemedicine) were analyzed.

Findings/conclusions: Resource changes due to technological modifications seemingly occurred without a distinct pattern. However, we could confirm that the changes not only affected activities in areas where new resources were introduced, but also had spillover effects. Our results reveal that the extent of changes caused by technological alterations can be determined through changes detected in information. The results highlight the importance of the extent of change and information management.

Limitations/future research: The most significant limitation to generalizing our findings is the research context itself. The sector-specific characteristics of the healthcare sector limit the generalizability of our results. Another limitation is the number of observed cases and our research method. This suggests the need for further research, as it seems justified to test the TDABC methodology on multiple other cases.