The total cost of ownership model to evaluate tech investments is no longer viable for the healthcare industry.
As investments in health IT grow and technology begins to more often be monitored remotely, the TCO model "falls flat," Kristi Matus, executive vice president and chief financial and administrative officer of Watertown, Massachusetts-based electronic health record vendor athenahealth, writes at Forbes.
"To shore up the strength of our healthcare institutions, healthcare organizations need to redefine the prevailing model of total cost of ownership to account for results and the opportunity costs of an underperforming system," she writes. "When they do, they will find that the total cost to operate and deliver results is a far more accurate forecast of how their technology purchases will serve their organizations' bottom lines," she writes. Article