Healthcare Information Technology Research & Analysis : Coplan & Company : IT Procurement Management, Project Management, System Acquisition

An interesting post, Health Care Renewal: Do Healthcare Organizations Truly Want Electronic Health Records To Succeed?, lists classic reasons for HIT failures that so many of see.  For example:

...the EMR allegedly cannot be used by senior executives to gauge the productivity of salaried physicians and that the senior people feel they do not have a quality system (yet who selected it in the first place?) The end users were apparently not utilized to make the decision nor to beta test or write user requirements, and in retrospect senior leaders are doubting the system was needed at all for ambulatory. No pilot was conducted.

I agree that health care organizations do not fundamentally oppose HIT.  They just do not know how to plan their project, define their needs, acquire the system they require and implement that system successfully.

Applying project and change management best practices help make HIT projects successful. Specific best practices include:

1. Senior executive leadership championing the project
2. User involvement throughout the project
3. Stakeholder involvement during definition of requirements, selection of the vendor system, and configuring, testing and piloting the selected system

It appears the project failed to use any of these best practices.  No wonder there was opposition to this specific project.  That does not mean there is opposition to all HIT.