Risk Assessment in the Implementation of Hospital Information System: A Case Study

Hospital information systems play an important role in improving coordination between different sectors of a hospital and increasing the efficiency of its managerial processes. Despite great advantages of these systems, many hospitals have encountered some obstacles at the implementation stage that deviate the systems from their primary goals. These events caused the hospital information systems to fail. The aim of this paper is to present a model for identification of these events and categorize them and finally prioritize them in order to manage or hinder their occurrence.
Firstly, by reviewing the related literature, we identified the risks that possibly can occur in this area. After extracting the risks, their consequences have been quantified by means of expert judgment. Experts were selected from Milad hospital. Then the risk's priorities have been determined by applying fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. The reliability and the validity of the related questionnaire have been determined
Between four identified factors, the highest scores were related to the managerial factors with the weight of 0.84 while the organizational factors gained the lowest score by the weight of 0.01. After multiplying the probability of each risk factor to its consequence, the priorities changed.
Employing qualified personnel in the field of health information systems, providing necessary trainings to them and preparing technical infrastructure before the implementation of the system along with the assignment of the required resources, and paying special attention to interpersonal relationships are very crucial in the reduction of failure risk of hospital information system implementation project.