A Semantic Web management model for integrative biomedical informatics.

Background: Data, data everywhere. The diversity and magnitude of the data generated in the Life Sciences defies automated articulation among complementary efforts. The additional need in this field for managing property and access permissions compounds the difficulty very significantly.

Returns, not burns: how to ensure successful health IT investments.

With many types of financial investments, the hospital financial community has long-established, and relatively straightforward, practices for projecting and measuring returns. Not so with health IT investments, however, where returns can be difficult to identify and quantify and even harder to track. Yet the success of such an investment depends on measuring the returns--whether they be tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term--because effectively tracking returns is the only way to be sure of achieving them.

5 rules for effective IT investment planning.

For effective IT investment planning, healthcare administrators should: Have a clear business strategy in mind. Use the same comprehensive planning process the organization would for any other significant investment. Anticipate and develop responses to changing dynamics of both the healthcare business and technology environments.

Will decision support in medications order entry save money? A return on investment analysis of the case of the Hong Kong hospital authority.

The computerized medications order entry system currently used in the public hospitals of Hong Kong does not have decision support features. Plans are underway to add decision support to this system to alert physicians on drug-allergy conflicts, drug-lab result conflicts, drug-drug interactions and atypical dosages. A return on investment analysis is done on this enhancement, both as an examination of whether there is a positive return on the investment and as a contribution to the ongoing discussion of the use of return on investment models in health care information technology investments.

Finding value from IT investments: exploring the elusive ROI in healthcare.

This article explores the historical IT value research, discusses its applicability to IT investments in healthcare, and highlights how it is challenged by several factors unique to the healthcare industry. The integration of historical IT value research with healthcare industry attributes provides an important context for understanding why the IT value proposition in healthcare has been so elusive. The article also poses a set of guidelines, which, based on the IT value research outside of healthcare, may assist in alleviating some of the current frustration with determining the value of healthcare IT investments.