Here’s the Abstract for a paper recently accepted to the HaCIRIC 2010 conference.  It establishes the premise for my Benefits Quantification project.  Basically, although there’s lots of guidance out there asking healthcare investors to assess and demonstrate the “benefits” realised by their efforts, this is seldom done.  When it is done, it is done poorly. 

Hence the need for a structured and reasonably reliable method of quantifying benefits (a difficult thing to do when many of them are intangible and amorphous)!

QUANTIFYING THE BENEFITS OF HEALTHCARE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT

D. Thomson, L. Pronk, C. Alalouch, A. Kaka     

ABSTRACT

UK government seeks the use of Benefits Realisation Management Processes (BRMPs) to direct capital investments that are technically complex and must satisfy a diverse range of stakeholder needs. Although BRMP frameworks are available, methods to inform them with reliable quantifications of stakeholders’ judgements of benefits realisation are currently absent. 

The articulation of benefits in current practice is reviewed to establish the context of benefits realisation. Benefit-related healthcare policy is reviewed by desktop survey of government publications and NHSScotland business cases. A conceptual framework for benefits quantification which characterises benefits realisation using stakeholders’ judgements and perceptions of benefit worth is contributed.

Translation of stakeholder judgements of benefit provision magnitude into indications of benefit worth by means of benefit functions is explored and related to BRMP operation. The use of utility functions to translate judgements of magnitude into representations of ‘worth’ is found to be an appropriate premise for benefit quantification.

KEYWORDS
Benefits; Investment; Judgement; Stakeholders; Utility.