Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

Traditional hospital budget systems are holding back innovation, experts say

Healthcare IT News: Though it's a formula that has functioned well historically, the way hospitals construct their budgets is hurting the integration of innovation, not helping it. To help grow innovation, decentralizing the hospitals budget is essential, say three experts in an article for Harvard Business Review.

Avant-garde Health CEO Derek Haas, former Newton-Wellesley Hospital President and Harvard professor emeritus Michael Jellinek and Robert Kaplan, co-author of "How to Solve the Cost Crisis in Health Care" co-authored the piece, which said that while recent research shows 75 percent of senior hospital executives support digital innovation overall, hospitals remain slow at adopting them. While at least some of that is due to overburdened IT staff, the authors say the real issue is the now-prohibitive manner in which hospitals construct and follow their budgets. They narrowed it down to three primary barriers.

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