Information technology: doing more, spending less.
Few hospitals use their increasingly limited financial resources to successfully realize all the benefits of information technology (IT). Part of the problem in achieving success is that hospitals waste funds by, for example, allowing "temporary" consultants to become long-term, full-time fixtures in the IT department. Or the organizations create conditions for failure by overstaffing or understaffing their IT departments or opting to invest in pilot or beta technology of unproven worth. Healthcare finance executives need to scrutinize the IT expenditure requests they receive and evaluate the realistic return on investment. They also need to conduct audits of their IT contracts and invoices to ensure they are not paying unnecessary or invalid fees.