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.

Note: This OECD publication can be accessed in a 'Browse it' or 'Look inside' format from the OECD website (i.e. you cannot freely print out or download). To obtain the full text you need to access SourceOECD (or its successor OECD iLibrary) or purchase a paper or electronic version from the OECD Bookshop.

• Primary Source

Website: OECD iLibrary http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/

Website: OECD iLibrary http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/

---