It is important for any healthcare organization to understand what their strategy for eHealthcare is before implementing any solution. Once the expectations are known, a strategy can be planned and developed – from our perspective, such a strategy is essential.

The basis for an effective eHealthcare strategy is an understanding of your organizations overall business goals. eHealthcare is a way to facilitate improvements in processes, in addition to allowing for expansion of market penetration, geographical markets, etc.

Therefore, all processes that will be integrated into this infrastructure must be both known and ready for integration. To implement an eHealthcare platform or framework without understanding overall business goals or processes is likely to lead to failure.

The goal of an eHealthcare strategy is to help answer the following questions:

What are the priorities and their justifications? What types of applications make sense and why? What are the implementation options and challenges for high priority applications? What is the long-term plan and timeline for implementing the applications? As the strategy project progresses, it is important to re-evaluate the plan being developed. It is common to lose focus on the business goals of the project and focus instead on potential technology implementation. Continue validating goals by focusing on overall business needs.

One of the primary reasons to develop an eHealthcare strategy before beginning implementation is to minimize the project risks. By developing the strategy first, you are more likely to pursue projects that:

Maintain focus on the business goals Work within existing processes and include appropriate links Ensure the company's infrastructure is ready for the change eHealthcare will bring. Finally, it is important to note that an eHealthcare strategy is not a one-time event but an iterative process. Much like long-range business planning, eHealthcare plans must be re-evaluated and adjusted on a regular basis.