Designing national electronic services in the public healthcare sector.

Abstract

This thesis deals with a socio-technical approach towards the development of inter-organisational ICT tools in healthcare. My overall case is Norwegian healthcare, and I investigated how national inter-organisational ICT tools were developed and why good results were difficult to achieve. Three public projects make up the basis of my data collection in which the main categories of data are interviews, participant observations and document studies. The data collection period spanned 2005 to the completion of this thesis. The main contribution of this thesis is the empirical insight into the long-standing establishment of inter-organisational health care services in Norway, a country that is characterised primarily by a publicly funded healthcare system. Studying this domain have demanded an inter-disciplinary approach because of the need to understand work practices, the implications of development and the complexities of information infrastructures, financing, project management, political governance and political philosophies. This study demonstrates how the strategies adopted by Norwegian authorities have changed. These strategies began as measures for invigorating the sector through the funding of public projects that establish specifications which vendors can use in developing new services. The strategies have transitioned into a top-down approach, with the Directorate of Health as the dominant stakeholder in a dedicated and specialised market. The recent strategy represents an approach that prioritises projects in a political process instead of basing such projects in extensive discussions in the healthcare sector. On the basis of the results, I suggest that a middle position be adopted in organising large-scale projects on integrated information systems. Such a strategy will give more power to the users of the information system. I believe that in real-world settings, a step-by-step strategy is favourable but requires good conditions for continued growth. Critical tasks are to break down large projects into a series of smaller ones, prioritise direct business value and assemble stable, full-time and cross-functional teams that execute these projects along a disciplined agile and optimisation approach.