Medical IT

To enable IT implementation in medical institutions, the best way to deal with resistance would be by use of facilitation plus support. This approach can be used in cases where the users are resisting the change due to perceived adjustment problems.

In medical institutions, the resistance problem can be broken down into three broad categories namely; the staff, the budget allocations and patients. According to publication by Health Affairs, some 80 percent of hospitals and 95 percent of doctors still use the old data collection models they were using some fifty years ago which points out that the institutions typically have adjusted to the old system models.

The staff, citing the example of Cendars Sinai hospital in 2002 where a software implementation was thrown out, may be a serious obstacle to technological advances. The fact that the system being implemented had to be thrown out points out that the approach that should be used is that of facilitating the doctors in using the system so incase of any errors they are dealt with also giving them full support in an effort to reduce the learning curve also avoid most trauma associated with new systems.

Most of the patients will always be afraid of their medical information being exposed to everyone. Looking at the case of the chief information officer from Indianapolis who received death threats for his attempts to share the medical information across the hospitals, the thing that is clear is the lack of confidence in data security. For the patience to be comfortable with software solutions, there must be facilitation to ensure they understand the various security features that can be implemented to ensure that their medical data still remains undisclosed.

The medical field is one with unusually little profit margins and these coupled with the technophobia experienced by the hospital doctors and administrators translates to a small budget allocation for medical IT. For any progress to be achieved in terms of getting more funding for technology improvement, the administrators must be facilitated to grasp the financial and medical benefits to be reaped from technology.