Realizing positive returns from your e-health investments

Although the healthcare industry still is in the beginning stages of e-health adoption and has yet to achieve a significant return on e-health investments, healthcare organizations can anticipate increasingly positive results over time. To capitalize on the potential of e-health, financial managers need to adopt a clear, concise approach to valuing e-health investment options, making investment decisions, and managing an organization's return on invested capital. Key actions to take are developing a strategy, looking beyond cost reduction to other advantages of e-health strategies, understanding the needs of the stakeholders, becoming comfortable with experimentation, having realistic expectations, and instituting a process for valuing e-health investments that does not duplicate valuation processes for traditional information technology projects.