Because the scope of healthcare information systems (IS) is extremely broad and because most such IS impact either directly or indirectly on the provision and safety of healthcare, the failure of healthcare IS is a topic of critical importance for information management and development professionals. Such failure is also important for the customers of the health service.
In this paper we emphasize the need for organizations such as the UK National Health Service (NHS) to evaluate their projects in terms of the issue of IS failure. We present a framework for IS evaluation which may be used to enable this process of organizational learning. This leads us to develop a model of IS failure that can be used in evaluation exercises of this nature. We apply this framework to two case studies of UK healthcare IS projects that are generally deemed to have failed to illustrate the efficacy of this framework. Finally, we consider a number of reasons why the NHS may be particularly prone to the phenomenon of IS failure.
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