An investigation into the current it legislation affecting small health care organisations with respect to the management of information

Authors: Roushan, G., White, A. and Manville, G.

Journal: ECIME 2007: European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation

Pages: 367-374

Abstract:

The aim of this study is to investigate the current IT (Information Technology) legislation with respect to the secure management of information, and its application by small health care organisations. Small healthcare organisations are a sub-category of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The research adopted a hybrid positivist and interpretivist research philosophy, a deductive approach, a hybrid survey and case study research strategy, and cross sectional time horizon. The research methods employed are questionnaires, semi-structured interview-using census, sampling and purposive samples. The findings of the research identified that the majority of small health care organisations are not fully adhering to Information Management legislation. Although many aspects of the legislation are adhered to through common best practice, the key issues identified are the lack of existence of formal processes for adhering to aspects of the legislation, training for employees to increase the awareness of an organisations legislative requirements and senior management involvement. The conclusions drawn from the research identified that small health care organisations are struggling to fully adopt Information Management legislation, in these organisations Information plays a vital role in their ability to operate, therefore its secure management is a vital concern for their prosperity and continual operation. Small health care organisations need to address the issue of adherence to Information Management legislation in order to fulfil the public's wish for privacy and to ensure they operate in accordance with the law.

Source: Scopus