Towards assessing the networkability of health care providers: a maturity model approach

This paper presents a networkability maturity model as an approach to assess a health care organisation’s capacity with regards to being able to efficiently engage in business relationships. Continuously rising costs and increasingly restrained budgets for health care put pressure on the public health systems. A low division of labour and integration of processes along cross-organisational patient therapy provides large potential for improvements in efficiency and efficacy. It is the aim of the presented model to enable identification of potentials for improvements and respective measures to advance the ability to benefit from specialisation and collaboration along the value chain. The presented model is developed based on a classification of related state-of-the-art in maturity models to assess individual factors of networkability which are integrated to form an overall framework comprising six components and respective factors to be assessed. As networkability maturity addresses the interrelation of strategy, organisational design and information systems design, the paper adheres to requirements for effective design science research applied to the process of construction of a networkability maturity model applicable for health care providers. It therefore concludes with a case-based evaluation according to the design research literature and identification of further research.