ICT Role in Creating the Imaginary E-Health Organization and a Collaborative Value System for the Health of the Nation

Abstract

Today's ICT, globalization as well as other environmental changes forced organizations to recognize that the essence of an organization is to cooperate. Now, many organizations are beginning or ‘forced' to create the borderless and imaginary type of organization. Creating an imaginary organization is an efficient alternative to cooperate through strategic networks, as long as the sum of production and organizational costs is less than ‘going it alone'. The medicine and medical sector display a specific strong network component consisting of a considerable number of senior academic and non-academic physicians and professional consultants related to each other on collegial grounds. Such an informal network (e.g. individuals, small clinics, medicine researchers) can be described as an imaginary organization (IO). This chapter provides knowledge of how to develop an imaginary healthcare organization (HIO) as a necessary tool to achieve a sufficiently large scale of operation and substantial growth of knowledge, within a context where their own conventional resources are very limited.