By Langtao Chen, Aaron Baird and Detmar Straub

Problem:

More than 500 articles related to health IT were published in IS journals between 1990 and 2017. While remarkable that such a significant quantity of quality health IT research is being published in IS journals, it is nearly impossible, even for researchers who read in this area regularly, to comprehensively understand what this research has contributed.

Article Summary:

To address this problem, we applied analytics methods to systematically analyze the 571 health IT articles published in IS journals between 1990 and 2017. Our article describes how and why we conducted this research as well as the key health IT trends, research theme dynamics, article relationships, and thought leaders systematically identified via our analyses.

Key Takeaways:

• We find four, central health IT research themes: (1) Health IS Acceptance, (2) Health IS Implementation, (3) Health IS Outsourcing, Performance, and Investment, and (4) EMR and EHR. These findings suggest that much of the core of health IT research centers on how health care organizations invest in and then assimilate enterprise health IT, such as EHRs.
• Our findings suggest that five health IT research themes offer significant opportunities for future research: (1) Health Analytics and Data Mining, (2) Mobile Health, (3) Health Information Interchange, (4) Clinical Pathway and Treatment Management, and (5) Online Health Communities and Digital Services.
• We also identify specific leaders in health IT as a whole and within their thematic sub-communities. These findings offer academic institutions insights into who could lead their efforts to capitalize on health care and IS initiatives.

To learn more, visit https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol20/iss8/5/.