User Attitudes and Support in Health Information Systems Implementation - the case of the Danish Sundhedsplatformen

The implementation of Health Information Systems (HIS) has been heralded as bringing numerous benefits to the healthcare sector. When implementing a HIS, the attitudes of the various users (nurses, doc-tors, admin people) towards the HIS can be influenced by a number of different factors. User support has proved to be one of the most important ones. Most recently, Sundhedsplatformen, one of the largest public HIS in Denmark, is being implemented in 18 hospitals across Zealand. In this context, we conducted 21 interviews at one of the major hospitals, Rigshospitalet, and qualitatively coded them. This allowed us to explore three archetypical groups of user attitudes toward Sundhedsplatformen: ‘Dedicated’, ‘Frustrated’ and ‘Despondent’. Further, we identified manifestations of insufficient user sup-port on different levels. We clustered these elements into three levels of support: ‘Individual’, ‘Techno-logical’ and ‘Organisational’. Reflecting on the manifestations of insufficient user support enables us to achieve a nuanced and holistic understanding of user support as an important adoption factor and further how user attitudes can be addressed when implementing HIS

Understanding resistance to IS-related change

When adopting and diffusing new Information Systems (IS) people often show signs of resistance and animosity when they are required to change their behaviour through use of new digital technology in organisational settings. However, resistance may take many forms and may vary from stakeholder to stakeholder. Further, it may be very challenging to know how to handle and cope with different types of resistance. Understanding the type of resistance and how it is expressed externally is an extremely important part of any digital transformation in order to make the wished-for change happen. In this paper we analyse 6000 Facebook posts that revolve around a new digital healthcare platform with more than 40,000 daily users that all were required to adopt and use the new system. We infer an overall framework of resistance to change (RtC) that enhances the understanding of the phenomenon and paves the way for new potential coping strategies

A Study of the Pre-implementation Phase of Sundhedsplatformen

This study reports on the extended time period prior to the introduction of the largest ever Health IT implementation in Denmark – Sundhedsplatformen. The focus of the dissertation is on organizational implications of introducing new technology and more specifically the anticipation of organizational members waiting for changes to take effect. The 3-year period leading up to the ‘go-live’ of Sundhedsplatformen has been a unique opportunity to study the anticipatory phase in connection with large scale IT project and has resulted in the development of a theoretical / conceptual framework for the analysis of this pre-implementation phase. Three major findings have come out of the study

Quality Development in Health Care: Participation vs. Accreditation

For more than a decade, quality development in the Danish health care sector has been managed with an accreditation system known as the Danish quality model (DQM), shaping the strategy for how to align work organization with technology use. In this article, we introduce a participatory design approach, known as effects-driven information technology development (EDIT), and discuss how this approach may contribute to a new quality-assurance program for the Danish health care sector. Our purpose is to demonstrate how accreditation, which focuses on processes and standards, needs to be supplemented and balanced with participatory approaches that allow for local experimentation and implementation of high-quality outcomes. We describe accreditation and participatory design as two approaches to reconfiguring and aligning work organization and technology; further, we emphasize the differences in each approach’s strategy and application

Quality Development in Health Care: Participation vs. Accreditation

For more than a decade, quality development in the Danish health care sector has been managed with an accreditation system known as the Danish quality model (DQM), shaping the strategy for how to align work organization with technology use. In this article, we introduce a participatory design approach, known as effects-driven information technology development (EDIT), and discuss how this approach may contribute to a new quality-assurance program for the Danish health care sector. Our purpose is to demonstrate how accreditation, which focuses on processes and standards, needs to be supplemented and balanced with participatory approaches that allow for local experimentation and implementation of high-quality outcomes. We describe accreditation and participatory design as two approaches to reconfiguring and aligning work organization and technology; further, we emphasize the differences in each approach’s strategy and application