The status quo of information management in hospitals - results of an online survey

Context: Information Management (IM) departments in hospitals provide IT services supporting patient care and administrative hospital functions. Complexity and impacts of IT failures are continuously increasing. Therefore, professional IM departments are necessary, even though their importance is commonly underestimated. Objective: Little is known about the organization and variety of IM departments in German hospitals. Therefore, we want to characterize their capabilities. In this paper, we present a study that analyzes the current status of IM in German hospitals in the dimensions (i) organization of IM departments, (ii) educational degree of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), (iii) communication of the CIO with the hospital management, (iv) usage of IT-processframeworks, and (v) application system categories used for IM-related tasks. Method: The evaluation is based on an online survey of 134 CIOs. The survey questions were developed according to domain-specific literature, the SNIK-ontology, and interviews with domain experts. The survey questions were improved by a pretest. Results: The survey indicates that most of the CIOs are graduates in informatics with 13 years of experience, who are responsible for one hospital without being member of the hospital management. CIOs communicate in weekly formal meetings with the hospital management where they discuss projects, finance, security, and critical ITand hospital services. Most IM departments do not use IT-process frameworks, but nearly all of the IM departments use ticketing systems, network management systems, project management tools, collaboration tools, BI tools, and ERP systems. The results show, that IM departments are generally well organized with the potential for improvement in IT-process-frameworks and application systems for IM functions.