Conceptualizing an Actor-Oriented Approachfor Healthcare Systems Integration

摘要

The efforts undertaken by healthcare organisations to modernise their services have resulted in the development of disparateHealthcare Information Systems (HIS). Systems heterogeneity has an impact on the quality of the services provided topatients. Thus, the integration of HIS will result in improvement of the quality of care provided to patients. Althoughhealthcare organisations have turned to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology to overcome their integrationproblems, they lag in applying EAI comparing to other sectors. Also, there is limited literature in this area, with the majorityof it focusing on the adoption of EAI in healthcare. This paper proposes an actor-oriented approach, which the authors claimas novel as: (a) it identifies healthcare actors involved in EAI adoption process and (b) it is combined with the factorsinfluencing EAI adoption. This approach is significant, as it (a) extends existing EAI adoption models by incorporating anactor-oriented analysis and (b) enhances the decision-making in this area, by supporting a more detailed level of analysis ofthe factors that the multiple healthcare actors perceive.