title: Design principles for achieving integrated healthcare information systems.
abstract: Achieving integrated healthcare information systems has become a common goal for many countries in their pursuit of obtaining coordinated and comprehensive healthcare services. This article focuses on how a small local project termed 'Standardized pull of patient data' expanded and is now used on a large scale providing a majority of hospitals, general practitioners and citizens across Denmark with the possibility of accessing healthcare data from different electronic patient record systems and other systems. I build on design theory for information infrastructures, as presented by Hanseth and Lyytinen, to examine the design principles that facilitated this smallscale project to expand and become widespread. As a result of my findings, I outline three lessons learned that emphasize: (i) principles of flexibility, (ii) expansion from the installed base through modular strategies and (iii) identification of key healthcare actors to provide them with immediate benefits.
authors.affiliation: Copenhagen Business School, Department of IT Management, Denmark. tbj.itm@cbs.dk
authors.forename: Tina Blegind
authors.initials: TB
authors.lastname: Jensen
mesh_terms: D016287:Computer Peripherals; D019033:Delivery of Health Care, Integrated / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003718:Denmark; D004059:Diffusion of Innovation; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000592:standards*; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D063005:Health Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D010348:Patient Care Team / Q000458:organization & administration; D010865:Pilot Projects; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018511:Systems Integration; D013673:Technology Assessment, Biomedical / Q000592:standards