Evaluating Integration Approaches Benefits Adopted by Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare organizations consist of a large number of disparate information systems (IS). These have been deployed to support specific needs of healthcare organisations. The information sharing among these disparate and heterogeneous systems has always been one of the most prominent issues for the management. As every day people die in hospitals, due to medical errors, which is generally causes due to non-integrated IT infrastructure. Various integration approaches have been adopted to solve integration problems. Although, some of them have partially supported the integration efforts, there are still many issues remaining to be solved such as level of integration, interpretability, cost reduction, and patients’ data security. There is marketplace confusion in healthcare organisations, due to the variety of integration approaches that support the integration of healthcare IS. This paper seeks to describe the current deployed integration approaches in healthcare organisations. In doing so, the benefits of these approaches are evaluated. This evaluation will help researchers to better understand issues surrounding the benefits of integration approaches