FACTORS AFFECTING COOPERATION AMONG PHYSICIANS IN SHARING INFORMATION WITHIN THE HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT: A STUDY OF TWO HOSPITALS

Healthcare Information Systems (HISs) in hospitals have become an influential factor to provide cooperation among physicians in sharing healthcare information. Many cooperative HIS models were proposed. However, they focused on management of the patients’ information and do not address the issue of improving the physicians’ skills due to many factors. In this study, a mixed data collection approach is used first to determine the current levels of cooperation among physicians with regard to the sharing of information and skills in the patient treatment within selected hospitals in Kurdistan region of Iraq. The second, it is first used to determine factors affecting such cooperation and second to determine how the activities of Research and Development (R&D) units affect this cooperation. The results of this study showed that the cooperation among physicians in sharing information and skills is poor due to the six important factors. The study also founded that there is positive relation between R&D unit activities and cooperation among physicians in sharing patient information and their skills. The study findings provided that the development of cooperative HISs environment should be adapted based on an open, autonomic, flexible and cooperative model to support exchange of productive information among physicians in real time in order to improve their skills by acquiring new knowledge from each other within same and between different hospitals.