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Healthcare organisations are exploiting the use of Information Technology (IT) to automate and improve their clinical and business processes. Decisions regarding IT implementations are often made at departmental level with each department developing information systems based on their needs, beliefs, practices and expertise. As a result, IT infrastructure in healthcare organisations often consists of a number of autonomous and heterogeneous systems. The integration of these systems is therefore amongst the most urgent priorities for healthcare organisations to meet the increasing clinical, organisational and managerial needs.
Over the years, several integration approaches such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Health Level 7, CEN/TC251, Synergy Extranet (SynEx), Synapses, etc) have been developed and deployed in healthcare organisations to address integration problems. These integration approaches have caused significant problems, such as high operational cost and functional problems.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has emerged to overcome integration problems at all levels (e.g data and process). EAI has provided significant benefits to organisations. EAI reduces the overall integration cost through reduction of integration time and maintenance cost. As a result, many organisations are embracing EAI to overcome their integration problem. However, it appears through a critical review of the literature that the evaluation of EAI adoption has not been widely studied in healthcare organisations. Therefore, healthcare organisations seek answers for the impact of EAI adoption, as it will help them in understanding the factors such as benefits, barriers and costs that influence the adoption of EAI in such organisations. Thus, the authors have proposed a conceptual model for EAI adoption in healthcare organisations by combining the factors identified separately from EAI adoption model, other integration technologies adoption models like EDI, Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and web services and finally from the literature on the healthcare sector. This proposed model makes a novel contribution at the conceptual level for the adoption of EAI in healthcare organisations.
Keywords:
Healthcare organisations, adoption, and Enterprise Application Integration.
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