ABSTRACT
According to the Institute of Medicine Report To Err is Human, there are 98,000 medication enors per year and 44,000 Americans die as a result of medical enors. One possibility to have a safer health care system is to support the processes by Information Technology (IT). This article discusses risk assessment of a hospital information system (HIS) by using fuzzy based decision making methodology. A case study was conducted at a Teaching and Research Hospital in Istanbul, Turkey. For this purpose, Zeng et al. (2007)'s fuzzy risk assessment model is used which quantifies linguistic variables and which is based on fuzzy inference. In the other risk assessment methods, risk magnitude is defined as risk probability and risk severity, but there are many factors which affect the possible risk in the implementation of HIS. Therefore, in this model, these factors are defined and integrated into the decision making process of risk assessment. Another important issue in risk assessment is to have high quality data. Since the risk assessment is
conducted before the implementation, there is no existing data. Fuzzy reasoning techniques provide an effective tool for handling uncertainties and subjectivities. In the case study, the risk for HIS implementation is measured based on experts' evaluations by using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy reasoning. The risk magnitude of the new HIS implementation for the hospital is found as major with a belief of 100%.
