eHealth expert’s attitude towards processes of digitization: contradictions between stakeholders
Date Issued |
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2017 |
eHealth is a complex innovation and challenges every single elements of Health care system: it must be accetabled by patients and health workers, as well integrated in organizational system and compatible with others technologies. However, it is still a challenge to measure eHealth success. Different measuring approaches are used to monitor eHealth implementations and made it difficult in the past to compare and cumulate results about impact of eHealth projects. Still there are no consensus who are the best expert in that field. Whether it is IT specialist or patient, clinician or head of administration? Research is based on a secondary data analysis of the three-year study, investigated the eHealth stakeholder network and stakeholder impact on eHealth development in Lithuania. The data from this study was available as 59 audio-recorded interviews, as well as the transcribed text of these interviews. Since respondents were selected in accordance to the geographical distribution and diversity of the levels and types of the represented jobs and institutions, their opinions represent diversity of the eHealth experts. The interviews involved respondents representing health care organisations from 10 cities of Lithuania, 8 types of organisations: hospitals (7), health care centres (2), primary health, care centres (2), clinics (2), private health care institutions (2), teaching university based hospitals and their subdivisions (3), ministries (1), institutions under the Ministry (1) and private IT companies (4) and a wide range of job positions. It has to be noted that each respondent group pointed out different eHealth key elements. Such discrepancies in the emphasis of important factors shows limitations in stakeholder approaches, complementary to each other. They clearly demonstrate that no individual stakeholder group is able to spotlight all possible problems in eHealth development. IT companies distinguished shortage of time allocated for eHealth implementation in the first place. Meanwhile, respondents representing health care institutions identified shortage of funds as the major problem. Doctors specified quality of information and compatibility of technologies as the most important criteria whereas administrative workers emphasized shortcomings in legal regulation. IT specialists in health care institutions noted poor computer literacy and motivation among doctors whereas doctors mostly appeal to irrelevant software design. So each category tends to identify problems within the scope of other categories. Thus, the more diverse approaches and stakeholders are timely involved into IT development the more effectively the development success may be controlled. Also, it has to be noted that stakeholder involvement contributes to sustainability of changes.