Driving health IT implementation success: Insights from The Christ Hospital

The application of information technology to healthcare promises significant benefits, particularly with regard to innovations in improving both clinical and administrative processes. However, to date, few studies have been devoted to understanding the process of implementing a hospital's clinical and business systems and the drivers of success. In this article, we describe a major HIT implementation undertaken by The Christ Hospital (TCH). Specifically, we report on TCH's efforts to separate from a well-established, multi-facility healthcare delivery network and move toward providing world-class patient care on its own. Here, we examine how different stakeholder perspectives, rather than causing conflict, were capitalized on via a collaboration-intensive process. These stakeholders included administrators, physicians, nurses, and other hospital staff, as well as external vendors and TCH's consulting partner. This project is unique due to the speed and spirit of collaboration with which it was accomplished. Our findings have a number of generalizable lessons for practice and implications for research. (C) 2009 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved.