Introducing Electronic Patient Records to Hospitals: Innovation Adoption Paths

Abstract

Healthcare is on of the industries that is currently fast adopting information technology (IT) into use. Electronic patient records (EPRs) are at the hearth of healthcare information technology applications. However, patient data is seldom efficiently organized even within one organization, and when patient data is needed in applications covering several organizations, the situation becomes even more complicated. We draw some lessons on how EPR systems should look like from the customer relationship management literature point of view: After all, patients are the customers of healthcare institutions. As a guiding framework for this analysis we use the concepts developed by (Winter, Ammenwerth, et al,. 2001). Then we proceed to discuss how EPR systems diffuse in the healthcare industry and use the Internet standards adoption (ISA) model presented by (Hovav, Patnayakuni, et al., 2004) as a starting point. We apply this model to the diffusion of EPR systems in the healthcare industry. We found big differences between customer relationship management and EPRs management. Customer relationship management aims at long-term relationships and customer profitability, which are not strong goals for EPR systems. Our analysis too resulted to the conclusion that the practical innovation adoption bath for EPRs over paper-based patient records is that of adoption through coexistence.