Abstract
The benefits for any health care provider of successfully introducing an Electronic
Patient Record System (EPRS) into their organisation can be considerable. It has the
potential to enhance both clinical care and managerial processes, as well as producing
more cost-effective care and care programmes across clinical disciplines and health
care sectors. However, realising an EPRS's full potential can be a long and difficult
process and should not be entered into lightly. Introducing an EPR System involves
major personnel, organisational and technological changes. These changes must be interwoven
and symbiotic and must be managed so that they grow together in stages towards a vision
created and shared by all clinical professional staff, other staff, and managers in
that process. The use of traditional “building” or “journey” metaphors inadequately
reflects the complexity, uncertainty and, therefore, the unpredictability of the process.
We propose that a more useful metaphor may be of “growing” a progressively more united,
unified information system and health care organisation. We suggest this metaphor
better recognises that the evolutionary process appears to be more organic than predictable
and more systemic than mechanistic. An illustration is given of how these organisational
clinical and technical issues might evolve and interweave in a hospital setting through
a number of stages.
Keywords
Electronic Patient Record - Organizational Change - Implementation - Information Systems
