Visualizing Benefits: Evaluating Healthcare Information System Using IS-Impact Model

Abstract

Reducing costs and optimizing operations are major challenges in many large-scale organizations including healthcare authorities. Research shows that despite ongoing investments in healthcare information systems (IS), the promised benefits often are partially realized or not at all. Part of the solution is to ensure that evaluation methodologies are available to clearly identify the success of these initiatives and from here articulate and mitigate the deficiencies or move to an alternative technology. The literature asserts that few practitioners have implemented a standardized evaluation approach. Using an established model, namely Information System Impact (IS-impact) model, we proposed a modified evaluation model to assess and a visualization tool to visualize the success of an information systems from a healthcare perspective. The modified IS-Impact model includes six constructs – individual impact, organization impact, provincial alignment impact, system quality, information quality, and service quality. We applied the modified IS-impact model and the proposed visualization tool against an existing healthcare software solution. An empirical study was conducted at a healthcare authority, with responses from 150 participants who use the healthcare IS, which confirmed that the proposed model and the visualization tool are valid and reliable to measure healthcare systems success. The evaluation model and the visualization tool are found to be efficient to narrow down the scope of inquiry from the general to the specific and quickly identifying the gaps and successes within the established software solution for the healthcare authority. Healthcare or clinical informatics researchers will be benefited from this research in evaluating the ongoing or nearly established healthcare information systems.