Scope and role of strategic technology management in Austrian hospitals: a decade later

摘要

In the last decade, major reforms in healthcare finance and rapid advances in medicine brought about noticeable changes in the management of medical technology for many countries. To contribute an updated Austrian perspective, we again explored the scope as well as the current and potential future role of strategic technology management in hospitals of Vienna and related our findings to previous studies. In particular, we once more investigated issues of terminology, financial resource allocation, investment plans, and decision-making from a policy perspective and this time under special consideration of the performance-oriented hospital reimbursement system introduced in 1997. We found that strategic technology management gained importance in which could be clearly seen by improvement of technology assessment, purchase, evaluation, and monitoring. For example, nearly all technology types played a key role in medical decision-making. The share of key technologies generally rose. Investments in technology types and medical specialisation areas were mostly planned and performed in accordance to the reimbursement system. Medical technology decision-making was shifted for many technology types from top level to the respective departments and users.