AN AHP FRAMEWORK FOR HOSPITAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS’ EVALUATION: THE CASE OF TEHRAN PRIVATE HOSPITALS

Abstract

E-health is defined as the use of electronically–supported applications in the field of healthcare. One of the subsidiaries of e-health is Health Information System (HIS), more specifically Hospital information System (HoIS) which has been recently transformed from paper-based Information System (IS) into electronic one. Although not all healthcare organizations have gone through the transformation process completely, the evaluation of HIS has been the concern of many scholars. In this paper, a hierarchical structure for HoIS evaluation is developed using the available recent literature. Subsequently, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-based questionnaires were designed and data was collected from HoIS professional users and experts working at Tehran Private Hospitals. The respondents were asked to make pairwise comparisons between each two criteria regarding their importance in the HoIS evaluation process. By employing Group AHP method, weights will be assigned to each criteria presented in the hierarchical structure and the final framework can be used as a guideline for healthcare managers and HoIS software providers

Keywords

• E-health, Hospital Information Systems, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

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