Anchor practices that guide horizontal performance measurement: an interventionist case study of the financial aspect of new technology implementation in healthcare

Abstract

With the demand for elderly care increasing in many countries, digital technologies offer the potential for organising such care while also increasing value for money. However, public administrators need tools to make sense of their own complex environment and the possible impacts of new technologies. The current paper examines this issue by applying horizontal performance measurement, where practitioners can give financial value to issues that span across many functions and thus avoid sub-optimisation. We use an interventionist case study to illustrate a situation in which a Nordic city attempted to calculate the financial impact of introducing new digital technologies into elderly care. As our contribution to the literature on horizontal performance measurement, we show how economic (financial) and wellbeing anchors influence horizontal performance measurement in a healthcare digitalisation project. We also contribute to the development of our method theory, i.e., anchor practices, by providing evidence of the usage of multiple simultaneous anchors and make a methodological contribution by showing that interventionist researchers can support operationalising anchor practices.

Discourse analysis on sustaining the maieutic role “when management accounting goes digital”

“…Instead, they saw even imperfect information as helpful, as long as one identifies such imperfections and understands the assumptions made in the process of generating MA answers. While we have expected that accounting digitalization might become a hampering viewpoint for the maieutic role of accounting (Quattrone, 2016; Busco and Quattrone, 2018) and more specifically for operations in non-routine decisions (Korhonen et al , 2021b), our paper provides awareness of the potential of digitalization to actually enhance the maieutic role of accounting by keeping up the debate between conflicting (optimistic, pessimistic) viewpoints (Korhonen et al , 2023).…”

“…We consider the presence of all discourses important, to spark and keep up debate over whether and how digital tools could support managerial work in non-routine decisions (cf. Korhonen et al , 2023), thus actually fueling the maieutic role of numbers rather than turning it off. However, we do note that such optimistic and pessimistic views on AI are prone for bias, and one should also scrutinize the discourses individually to ensure that the discourses remain factual.…”