Title: Does shareholder value make sense in healthcare organisations in order to assess investment proposals?

Authors: Giovanni Azzone, Emanuele Lettieri, Cristina Masella

Addresses: Department of Business Economics and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy. Department of Business Economics and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy. Department of Business Economics and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy

Abstract: The Italian healthcare system is today involved in a significant renewal process, aimed at improving effectiveness, efficiency and monitoring costs. Increasing competition and continuous reduction in public expenditure for the healthcare sector call for a management able to allocate the available resources (human, financial and technological) to the more promising projects, avoiding the waste of resources in unsustainable or useless investment proposals. The aim of this paper is to present a formal method to evaluate investments in medical technology, based on shareholder value theory. The method has been tested at the Department of Oncology at an Italian healthcare organisation in order to assess the benefits and costs due to the introduction of a new generation linear accelerator.

Keywords: technology assessment; investment assessment; shareholder value theory; value-drivers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHTM.2002.001140

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 2002 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.220-238

Published online: 01 Jul 2003 *

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