A Proposition of Critical Success Factors Influencing SOA Implementation in Healthcare

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been proved to be a significant integration paradigm in many sectors including healthcare. The importance of the development of integrated Information Technology (IT) services and infrastructures in healthcare is enormous as medical errors that occur due the non integrated nature of healthcare systems result in the loss of human lives. The normative literature demonstrates that organizations have difficulties in getting full benefits from SOA adoption for various reasons. Thus, we suggest that the investigation of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) related to SOA implementations in healthcare is important as the understanding of these factors may help organizations to increase the benefits they get from SOA and improve SOA acceptance rate. As a result we review the literature to identify SOA CSFs in healthcare and we classify them. Then we test them through a case study in a public healthcare organization. The results stress the crucial importance of governance and culture and proposed that a new CSF called “Communications” should be considered. In doing so, we extend the body of literature and we suggest that further research is required to better understand SOA CSFs in healthcare.