How can user-centred design affect the acceptance and adoption of service oriented healthcare information systems?

This paper examines healthcare information systems (HIS) integration through service oriented architectures (SOA) and cloud computing by employing a user-centred design (UCD) approach. In order to investigate this area, three research issues were defined and tested through a case study strategy. Our research is based on data collected from three hospitals that are based in different European Union (EU) regions. Overall 29 participants from Northern, Central and Southern EU states were interviewed and provided significant data. From the research analysis it is revealed that two out of the three proposed research issues were verified and show that: a) changes can be introduced to the UCD process to improve the usability, acceptance and adoption of integrated patient-centred HIS; b) Mantzana et al.'s (2007) method can be used during UCD to uncover hidden key users and improve the gathering of users' needs, roles and profiles. As a result, we altered the UCD process by adding new phases in the process. We expect that the new UCD process will have implications to the research and practice and will help developers to improve their software solutions.