Examining health information systems success factors in Uganda’s healthcare system

Abstract

Health Information Systems offer several benefits towards healthcare service delivery in Uganda including easy record keeping, enhancing communication, performing simple calculations, supporting decision making, gaining competitive advantage, better management of chronic diseases, faster retrieval of records, improving process flow and increasing productivity. However, the benefits mentioned have been hindered by failure of Health Information System. The success factors Health Information System in Ugandan healthcare system are largely unknown. The effect of these failures is most felt in Small and Medium Healthcare Enterprises who have limited resources and semi-skilled employees. This study determines success factors for Health Information Systems in Small and Medium Healthcare Enterprises in a developing country context like Uganda. The findings of the study therefore aid in understanding the key issues that lead to the success of Health Information Systems in developing countries, Uganda in particular. The study targeted staff of Small and Medium Healthcare Enterprises including doctors, nurses, administrators and laboratory attendants. A sample of 274 was taken from 274 health units but only 202 questionnaires were considered for analysis after data cleaning. Data were analyzed using Convergent and Discriminant Validity, Rotated Component Matrix tables, Communality and Regression analysis. The findings indicate that management support, user involvement, resource supply, and education and training are the most important success factors for Health Information Systems success.  Principal component analysis obtained show that all items on the listed variables had communalities above the significant level of 0.4 implying that all items exhibited sufficient loadings. This therefore implies that each of the items correlates highly with all other items and can at least easily load onto one of the factors. Further, multiple correlation coefficient R=0.717 obtained implies that there is a strong relationship between the multiple independent factors and the dependent variable.