The Benefits and Challenges of Using Pilot Implementations for Developing Healthcare IT Systems

Pilot implementation is a powerful approach to identifying and evaluating technical as well as organizational design and implementation issues before full-scale deployment. While pilot implementations are opportunities for learning, they often face a number of challenges that prevent or reduce learning. As a result, pilot implementations may fail to provide the evaluations needed to ensure a well-designed solution and a successful fullscale deployment. This is evident also for healthcare IT systems, an area that makes frequent use of pilot implementations.