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Top1. Introduction
An ongoing debate on how healthcare organizations can achieve greater success in implementing Health Information Technology (HIT) has evolved (Ash et al. 2003a; Brender et al. 2006; Heeks, 2006; Kaplan & Harris-Salamone, 2009). Today, healthcare professionals are still seeking knowledge of and continued to be highly interested in ways to help HIT implementation projects to succeed (Martikainen et al. 2012). Thus, there is a need to examine key factors that will lead to HIT implementation success, more specifically, factors that should be most attended to in the context of competing priorities.
Many studies (e.g. Alexander et al. 2011; Archer & Cocosila, 2011; Ash et al. 2003a; Ash et al. 2003b; Ash et al. 2005; Baron et al. 2005; Gagnon et al., 2009, 2010; Lorenzi et al., 2008, 2009; McGinn et al. 2011) have attempted to identify the success factors for HIT implementation. Ash et al. (2003a), for example, reported on twelve (12) principles towards achieving a successful Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) Implementation. Brender et al. (2006) presented a collection of 110 success factors; unfortunately, such success factor lists are long and unwieldy, and it can be difficult to see which ones should have received more attention than others. Thus, as also pointed out by other researchers (Khandelwal & Ferguson 1999; Remus & Wiener, 2010), prioritization of crucial success factors from the less crucial is necessary.
The current understanding of HIT implementation success factors is based on the gradual accumulation of mainly case and action research results (Nguyen et al. 2014), all of which would need further examination with sound methodological applications. Some prior work obtains the list of success factors from the opinion of expert panels (Ash et al. 2003a; Brender et al. 2006; Kaplan & Harris-Salamone, 2009). However, members of expert panels were mainly from academic institutions and the number of participants was limited. Other integrative work has relied on literature reviews (e.g. Cresswell & Sheikh 2009; Lau et al. 2012; Lluch, 2011; Van der Meijden et al. 2003), but few attempted to study practicing managerial opinions on success factors. Sudhakar (2012), for example, applied the approach of prioritizing critical success factors from an existing success factor list for software projects. The ranking method in this paper was based on the number of occurrences of a given success factor in the prior literature, rather than first-hand empirical data. No article was found to survey IT manager opinions in ranking HIT implementation success factors by priority.
The role of IT managers is crucial as they are often responsible for the initiation and implementation of information systems (Enns et al. 2003; Leidner et al. 2010; Watts & Henderson, 2006). IT managers, through their experience, can know best which relevant factors have been crucial for successful implementation of the projects; therefore, it is imperative to understand the perceptions of IT managers regarding relative importance of success factors in HIT implementation.