Assessing the need of decision-making frameworks to guide the adoption of health information systems in healthcare

Technological advancements have accelerated the deployment of healthcare information systems (HIS) with the potential to enhance productivity, lower costs, reduce medication errors, and ease the manpower strain on the healthcare industry. Although HIS can provide various benefits to healthcare professionals and patients, there is a high occurrence (50%) of unsuccessful HIS projects and problems with initiating their adoption. To investigate this phenomenon, this paper identifies decision-making theories, their short-coming of adopting HIS in healthcare organisations and decision-making facets that influence the adoption. These review will shed some light for future researchers to conceptualize, distinguish and comprehend the underlying decision-making models and theories that may affect the future application of HIS adoption. A literature search was conducted to identify studies presenting HIS decision-making adoption theories/models in a healthcare environment. From synthesis of 26 studies, we identified five major facets that provides a structure to organize and capture information on the decision-making and adoption of HIS. The themes presented here provide a starting point in understanding the decision-making adoption theories, their major facets and their short-coming in adopting HIS. This will facilitate our future research on decision-making framework for the adoption of HIS.