Returns, not burns: how to ensure successful health IT investments.

With many types of financial investments, the hospital financial community has long-established, and relatively straightforward, practices for projecting and measuring returns. Not so with health IT investments, however, where returns can be difficult to identify and quantify and even harder to track. Yet the success of such an investment depends on measuring the returns--whether they be tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term--because effectively tracking returns is the only way to be sure of achieving them.