Integration Technology Adoption in Healthcare Organisations: A Case for Enterprise Application Integration

A continuous technological innovation in software has brought development in integration technologies that promise the real time enterprise-wide systems integration. Healthcare organisations continue to struggle with integration challenges. However, much confusion regarding the adoption of integration technologies still remains. To provide a clear perspective about integration technologies, a discussion is presented on these technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Web Services. EAI has emerged to provide significant benefits to organisations. From a technical perspective, EAI addresses integration problems at all integration levels (e.g. data level and process level) by providing a flexible and manageable IT infrastructure. From a business perspective EAI reduces the overall integration cost due to the reduction in integration time and maintenance cost. This paper attempts to present the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of these technologies is presented. Thus, it can facilitate to healthcare organisations decision-makers during the adoption of integration technologies.