Successful Implementation of Clinical Information Technology

SummaryObjectives: To identify and describe the most critical strategic and operational contributors to the successful implementation of clinical information technologies, as deployed within a moderate sized system of U.S. community hospitals.Background and Setting: CHRISTUS Health is a multi-state system comprised of more than 350 services and 60 hospitals with over 9 000 physicians. The Santa Rosa region of CHRISTUS Health, located in greater San Antonio, Texas is comprised of three adult community hospital facilities and one Children’s hospital each with bed capacities of 142–180. Computerized Patient Order Entry (CPOE) was first implemented in 2012 within a complex market environment. The Santa Rosa region has 2 417 credentialed physicians and 263 mid-level allied health professionals.Methods: This report focuses on the seven most valuable strategies deployed by the Health Informatics team in a large four hospital CHRISTUS region to achieve strong CPOE adoption and critical success lessons learned. The findings are placed within the context of the literature describing best practices in health information technology implementation.Results: While the elements described involved discrete de novo process generation to support implementation and operations, collectively they represent the creation of a new customer-centric service culture in our Health Informatics team, which has served as a foundation for ensuring strong clinical information technology adoption beyond CPOE.Conclusion: The seven success factors described are not limited in their value to and impact on CPOE adoption, but generalize to – and can advance success in – varied other clinical information technology implementations across diverse hospitals. A number of these factors are supported by reports in the literature of other institutions’ successful implementations of CPOE and other clinical information technologies, and while not prescriptive to other settings, may be adapted to yield value elsewhere.

The Limitations of Using the Existing TAM in Adoption of Clinical Decision Support System in Hospitals

The technology acceptance model (TAM) has been widely used to study user acceptance of new computer technologies. Previous studies claimed that future technology acceptance research should explore other additional explanatory variables, which may affect the originally proposed constructs of the TAM. The use of information technology in the health care sector and especially in hospitals offers great potential for improving the performance of physicians, increasing the quality of services and also reducing the organizational expenses. However, the main challenge that arises according to the literature is whether healthcare professionals are willing to adopt and use clinical information technology while performing their tasks. Although adoption of various information technologies has been studied using the technology acceptance model (TAM), the study of technology acceptance for professional groups (such as physicians) has been limited. Physician adoption of clinical information technology is important for its successful implementation. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain a better insight about factors affecting physicians’ acceptance of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) in a hospital setting. The results reflect the importance of perceived threat to professional autonomy, perceived interactivity with clinical IT, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in determining physicians’ intention to use CDSS.