The Design and Use of Management Accounting Systems in Process Oriented Health Care – An Explorative Study

Abstract

Abstract Process orientation has made its entrance in Health Care Organizations (HCOs). The purpose is to improve patients’ journeys through the health care system. One factor that potentially affects process orientation is the design and use of Management Accounting Systems (MAS). In the literature there are worries that process orientation often is not supported by a well designed and used MAS but, on the contrary, is counteracted by a MAS designed for other purposes than supporting processes. This study contributes to the existing knowledge in that it shows how the introduction of process orientation within health care is accompanied by the development of horizontally oriented MAS (HMAS) which is used in different ways and by different actors. Generally, the use of HMAS for diagnostic control is limited. The main use of HMAS is for the purpose of mastering the events and interactive control, and the main users are the persons connected to the processes. The observation in earlier research that the existence of vertically oriented MAS may be a threat to process orientation is to some extent corroborated in the paper.

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