Visualising How Influential Circumstances within Implementations are Connected : A Study of Implementation Difficulties and Strategies in Healthcare

Abstract: According to the UN, several problems are expected to arise due to the longer life span of future generations. In conjunction with a reduced amount of healthcare personnel, lifted by the WHO, a predictable crisis is yet to come. To counteract this problem many nations have turned to digitalisation. For example, Sweden is currently working towards "Vision e-hälsa 2025", which among others implies becoming the world leader in using digitalised solutions by 2025. Digitalisation in the healthcare sector implicates to upgrade existing systems or implementing new Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). This master thesis focuses on the implementation processes of HIS, which need to be improved in order to achieve the earlier mentioned goal. A literature review was conducted where relevant strategies and barriers within implementation processes in healthcare were identified. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews with practitioners resulted in the finding of ten categories and four themes (group of categories) through qualitative analysis. The categories and themes are circumstances that affect implementations; the following were the most influential in an implementation: Planning, Communication, Practical Training and Follow-up & End-user involvement. In conclusion, the improvement of one or all of the circumstances above could contribute to a faster digitalisation in the healthcare sector. Finally, the authors suggested some of the selected strategies and other solutions as tools for improvement. This study contributes to current knowledge about implementations by discovering important gaps between knowledge and practice. Moreover, this study contributes partially to a methodological discovery in visualisation analysis.