Conceptualizing an actor-oriented approach for healthcare systems integration

The efforts undertaken by healthcare organisations to modernise their services have resulted in the development of disparate Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). Systems heterogeneity has an impact on the quality of the services provided to patients. Thus, the integration of HIS will result in improvement of the quality of care provided to patients. Although healthcare organisations have turned to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology to overcome their integration problems, they lag in applying EAI comparing to other sectors. Also, there is limited literature in this area, with the majority of it focusing on the adoption of EAI in healthcare. This paper proposes an actor-oriented approach, which the authors claim as novel as: (a) it identifies healthcare actors involved in EAI adoption process and (b) it is combined with the factors influencing EAI adoption. This approach is significant, as it (a) extends existing EAI adoption models by incorporating an actor-oriented analysis and (b) enhances the decision-making in this area, by supporting a more detailed level of analysis of the factors that the multiple healthcare actors perceive.