Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: In the recent years most African countries have embarked on a series of reforms involving the\ndecentralisation and also integration of health information systems in order to allow improved\nefficiency and effectiveness in the health care. However, although the discourse around these issues\nare reflected in global policy documents of almost twenty years ago, IS are still fragmented and weak\nat the lower levels of the health service. The paper takes a multivocal and multilevel institutionalist\nperspective to analyse the role of information technology in shaping these shortfalls between\ninstitutional accounts and enactments of reforms. Based on the case study of two divisions of the\nministry of health in Kenya, it aims to better understand the change implications of information\ntechnology for the structures of a health information system in Africa. This is meant to improve the\nunderstanding of the way technology-mediated human interactions produce variance between planned\norganisational change envisaged in donor-driven reforms of the health care service and unplanned\nHIS structures emerging from the local institutionally-embedded usage of IT tools.
Author: Roberta Bernardi
Institution: University of Warwick
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W275286425