Methodology for assessing social and economic efficiency of digitalization of health system

Abstract

Digital healthcare means integrating medical knowledge with IT applications or IT technology to improve healthcare and patient care. Digital technologies make it possible to focus on needs and provide preventive, clinical, and rehabilitation services. Today, digitalization of healthcare has great potential to improve the quality of medical care, taking into account patient safety, as well as sustainable economic growth.The purpose of the study is to develop a methodology that allows the most complete and adequate assessment of the economic and social effectiveness of the digitalization of the healthcare system, taking into account its inherent features and a high proportion of the implementation of target functions within the framework of the established activity.This article reviews the available approaches to determining the effectiveness of digitalization, but they do not reflect the specifics of the healthcare system. It was revealed that these methods do not consider an important generalizing indicator as gross value added, which, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, is taken into account in the country’s gross domestic product.The article proposes a methodology for assessing the economic and social effectiveness of digitalization of the healthcare system, which allows us to consider gross value added as a generalized result characterizing the production and sale of services, and as the efficiency of resource use in the process of providing medical services.This methodology is based on the theory of efficiency and the law of saving time, as well as approaches to determining criteria and performance indicators.

Keywords

• digitalization
• information system
• healthcare
• performance measurement methods
• gross value added