Dear reader,

Last week I was reading about the "Electronic  Presciption" in Primary Care in Spain. Here, we have 17 Regional Governments, and each one has developed their own solution.

In a blog of one of these regions, someone talked about the big amount of money that  this kind of solutions save. That's true, and I can't add anything. In Spain, we have other studies that demonstrate this:Our customers have a quick Return of Investment (ROI) when they implement our Healthcare Solutions. You can find some figures above: you will see some figures of Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (ROI Study done by IDC in 2007), and some details about  the implementation of SAP for Healthcare in Institut Català de la Salut (Public group with 8 hospitals).

(Click here to see the document)

I agree: financial ROI is very important, and with the current economic environment, perhaps it's more important. Organizations need to know the ROI to invest in Software and Technology.

We are proud of these studies; they reflect that our customers are saving costs with our healthcare solutions.

But, reading a lot of figures, I thought about some other benefits of Electronic Prescription: easy way to identify drug incompatibility problems, allergies, "current medication" of the patient accessible from any point of the healthcare network, etc.

I know that all of you know these advantages, but, reading that blog, I had the feeling that sometimes we only look through the economic window. And it's very difficult to price the fact of detecting an incompatibility between drugs.

So, let me summarize: I agree with the idea that the financial ROI is very important, but there is other ROI, perhaps we could name it "Quality ROI", where the KPIs are not in terms of money, they are in terms of Quality, Safety, Satisfaction, etc..