Leadership perspectives and ICT

The starting point for this contribution is questions related to leadership responsibilities and ICT; what is it, how to provide leadership and facilitate development and introduction of ICT-applications in the health care setting, and how can we best systematize the different experiences to prepare for the challenges ahead? Today, the development and introduction processes are just as often chaotic, political processes of changing and even conflicting interests and goals as the neat, streamlined project starting with specification, development and implementation of a system. It is likely to assume insecurity, due to several unanswered questions. These questions relate to the content included the ICT-application, introduction and integration in the practice setting and leadership in the transition to a fully integrated system. I will focus my attention today at 2 areas in need of immediate attention from a leadership perspective. It is important to provide leadership and direction to the information content in the ICT system. Questions like what kind of information should the system hold; what is appropriate information model, how to design and present the content, how to enter, manipulate, retrieve or reuse the information need attention. It is equally important to attend to system introduction. It is commonly held that introduction of ICT requires changes; ICT can even be a catalyst and enabler of change. There will be different constructions of this new technology. However health care work takes place in the tension of change and concurrent need for stability and some predictability in the practice setting. The health care provider¿s primary responsibility to care for patients¿ and provide appropriate treatments remains unchanged although ICT is introduced to support the information flow. Initially, use of ICT may be an additional burden. Therefore discussion of systems¿ requirements, functionality, strategy for implementation and integration and handling diverse expectations are important areas to address. These two aspects; information content and system introduction are key areas in the transition to paper-less environment, and. will probably influence construction of leadership in introduction of ICT significantly.