Title: Improving clinicians' involvement in healthcare information systems development and delivery

Authors: Senaka Fernando, Mark Lycett, Sergio De Cesare

Addresses: School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, UK. ' School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, UK. ' School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, UK

Abstract: The UK National Health Service (NHS) launched its biggest Information Technology (IT) programme to revolutionise the way care is delivered. Despite these high expectations UK government believes that the greatest challenge to the success of the National Program for IT (NPfIT) is that of securing the clinicians| active involvement in the NPfIT in order to ensure their buy-in at a local level. While there are many possible explanations for the lack of clinicians| involvement and buy-in, the poor relationship between IT and clinician groups is a commonly cited one. Consequently this paper proposes Personal Construct Theory to understand the relationship between the IT and clinician groups as well as a means to improve it. The paper argues that such understanding and the knowledge of ways to improve the poor relationship between these groups will help sponsors of the NPfIT to improve the clinicians| involvement in the national programme.

Keywords: information systems; clinicians; IT groups; cognition; personal construct theory; PCT; relationships; clinician involvement; National Health Service; NHS; UK; United Kingdom; information technology; healthcare technology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2008.016054

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2008 Vol.3 No.1, pp.73 - 85

Published online: 03 Dec 2007 *

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