Towards a Conceptual Framework of Actors and Factors Affecting the EAI Adoption in Healthcare Organisations

The non-integrated nature of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) is strongly associated with a reduction in the quality of care and the medical errors that occur. In particular, around 80,000 people die per year or paralyse in Australia due to problems related to medical errors and are mainly caused by the non-integrated nature of HIS. There is therefore a real need to integrate the Information Technology (IT) infrastructures, to improve the quality of care provided. During the last years much emphasis has been given on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology to bridge heterogeneous systems. Although EAI is being widely used by public and private organisations, it is underutilised in the area of healthcare. Thus, it is of high importance to investigate this area and result in research that contributes towards successful adoption of EAI. Currently, much of the literature on EAI in healthcare has focused on the identification of the factors that influence its adoption. In this paper, the authors attempt to extend this research area, by identifying the actors involved in the EAI adoption process. In doing so, the paper describes the causal relationships among the healthcare actors and factors that influence its adoption. Thus, the paper results in a novel approach that: (a) identifies the healthcare actors that are involved in the EAI adoption process and (b) combines these actors with the factors influencing the adoption of EAI. The proposed approach is significant, as it (a) extends the existing models on EAI adoption by incorporating an actor-oriented analysis and (b) might enhance the decision-making process for EAI adoption by supporting a more detailed level of analysis.