Achieving knowledge management integration through EAI: a case study from healthcare sector

The non-integrated nature of healthcare Information Systems (IS) is strongly associated with a reduction in the quality of care services. Therefore, healthcare organisations can not efficiently exchange data and knowledge. Thus, numerous medical errors occur that impact healthcare services. In response, healthcare organisations have attempted to integrate their IS using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Recent literature findings indicate that EAI achieves integration at four layers namely: (a) connectivity, (b) transportation, (c) transformation and (d) process integration. In this paper, we suggest that among others, EAI achieves Knowledge integration and we propose a revised model (REAL) which was tested through a case study. The results are significant as they show that cases leading to medical errors, wrong prescription and diagnosis can be prevented by integrating knowledge through EAI. This is of high importance, since around 23,000 and 100,000 patients die per year in UK and USA respectively from medical errors.