Implementing financial tools in hospitals: thinking beyond their technical characteristics

Abstract

In France, reforms of public hospitals have been comprising the implementation from the national level of financial tools that were rather standardized in their structures and formats. Among hospitals however, these tools have been implemented in a variety of ways and with different consequences. How can we account for this variety? And how can we reflect on the implementation of new management tools in hospitals? We propose a socio-technical analytical framework of management tools implementation based on five dimensions and illustrate its interpretive capacity on three cases studies of department’s P&L implementation in public hospitals.