An interorganizational information system in the health care arena: insights gained from a hierarchical analysis

1. ABSTRACT An innovative health care information system has been developed recently to share patient health care information among several competing hospitals in the greater Dayton area. An evaluation of this system by three main user/developer groups -physicians, medical records personnel, and IS personnel -is reported in a recent study [4]. In this paper, we examine responses of heads and non-heads of each of these three groups separately. The examination leads to four lessons that reinforce and extend the findings the earlier study. 2. INTRODUCTION To cope with escalating health care costs, health care providers have begun to examine the possibility of developing interorganizational information systems. A recent example is the Community Patient Health Information Network (CPHIN), developed to support the sharing of patient information across seven competing hospitals in the greater Dayton area. A brief history of this project is furnished below; further details of various aspects of the project may be found elsewhere [4], [5], and [6].