Contextual Factors Influencing the Design and Management of Health Information Systems’ Interoperability

Due to their renowned great information processing and dissemination power, Health information systems (HIS) can readily avail past patient medical information across the continuum of care in order to facilitate ongoing treatment. However, a number of existing HIS are designed as vertical silos with no interoperability onuses and therefore, cannot exchange patient information. At the same time, there is limited knowledge about the intricacies and factors that surround HIS’ interoperability implementations. This study therefore, employs an institutional lens perspective to investigate contextual factors influencing HIS’ interoperability designing. Through this perspective, seven contextual factors were arrived at institutional autonomism, intended system goals, existing health-information-systems, national HIS implementation guidelines, interoperability standards, policy and resources in terms of money and labour. A further study implication is the use of institutional lens in making sense of the institutions’ context of integration in order to discover salient factors that might influence health-information-systems’ interoperability designing.