Netzwerkfähigkeit im Gesundheitswesen

The Swiss health care sector is characterised by a low division of labour and annually rising costs. In order to increase effectiveness and efficiency, other sectors have implemented a high division of labour and extensive networking, in particular through the use of information and communication technologies. In the health care sector initial approaches to networking already exist at the technical level or for the purpose of process optimisation, but holistic approaches are missing. In this article, the authors first show a generic, holistic framework for designing networked structures. Thereafter it is shown how this framework can be transferred to the health care sector and the concept of network-ability – the ability to network with partners quickly and with low setup costs through m:n relationships – is introduced. The article concludes with a description of the procedure for validating and further developing the findings obtained.