Making Information Technology Work: Maximizing the Benefits for Health Care Organizations

By Roger Kropf and Guy Scalzi

Unlike banks, say, or express mail services, many health care institutions have been slow to abandon their paper-bound ways for up-to-date information technology. Nurses still record patient data on clipboards dangling from their patients’ beds, and those small screens bolted to the wall are more likely to be television sets than computers that record and provide useful information on prescriptions, diseases, and blood test results.

But as hospitals increasingly seek to integrate health care information technology into the ways in which they interact with patients and manage multiple levels of their operations, their executives, managers, and clinicians need to prepare themselves with a great deal of knowledge and tools to ensure success. Making Information Technology Work: Maximizing the Benefits for Health Care Organizations, co-authored by NYU Wagner Professor of Health Management Roger Kropf and Guy Scalzi, executive vice president of Veloz Global Solutions, provides just such how-to managerial guidance of critical importance to any healthcare organization.

Kropf, who teaches courses on management and information systems for health services organizations at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and Scalzi, a veteran health care information technology executive, take a three-part approach that makes it easy for non-IT executives and managers to assess a project’s development before, during, and after stages of implementation. The emphasis is on what personnel need to know — and do — to ensure that costly technology systems, once implemented, do not go underutilized or squandered.

The book grows from research and practical experience on how managers assess the value of health care information technology projects before approval, monitor whether projects are on time and on-budget, and measure performance after implementation.

Making Information Technology Work was published in September, 2007, by Health Forum/AHA Press. It uses case studies and effective project management tools and techniques from around the country to help readers maximize project benefits. The book arrives just as many local, state, and federal governments discuss increased subsidies and other forms of assistance to permit more and more health care institutions to modernize their information technology, given evidence that doing so saves both money and lives.

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