Informatization of health care: stakeholders interaction

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of theoretical models allowed to explain the reasons of the chronic problems in the field of healthcare informatization. The authors assume that problems are steadily reproduced and are of a general nature. The most important of these ones relate to a lack of interoperability and institutional resistance against implementation of the healthcare information systems by healthcare providers. This article also indicates that implementation of the healthcare information systems can lead not to enhancing but to decreasing the effectiveness of medical care providers work. The authors uses the reinforcement theory by K. Kraemer and J. King as an explaining scheme. This theory claims that the main impact of IT application has been to reinforce existing structures of authority and power in organizations and D. Collingridge’s model under which there is a tendency in ambitious projects to highly centralized decision making, dominated by large organizations, which are able to exclude many legitimate stakeholders, particularly, end-users. The authors conclude that the problems facing healthcare informatization are a result of submission of this process to the interests of only one stakeholder as healthcare managers without healthcare providers and patients.