Information Systems in Healthcare with a Special Focus on Developing Countries

Abstract

Information Systems offer tremendous opportunities to improve healthcare services. Thus far, they have a proven track record as a way to improve the quality of services, and work processes effectiveness. However, Health Information Systems can be inappropriately specified, having functional errors, being unreliable, and not user friendly. Such breakdowns may affect working processes and decisions of healthcare providers, resulting in potential harm to patients. This chapter will elaborate a number of important issues/problems related to Information Systems in healthcare with the aim of providing a deeper contextual insight into their application in healthcare and offer advice on the factors that should be considered when designing and evaluating them. The chapter aims at providing a literature review of Information Systems in healthcare and highlight the challenges Information Systems face in this domain by providing a significant review of Information System theory in healthcare.