Professor Eivor Oborn has been awarded the SIGHealth 2019 Meritorious Mention Paper Award for her paper Justifying Health IT Investments: A Process Model of Framing Practices and Reputational Value. Professor Oborn co-authored the paper with Stavros Polykarpou and Professor Michael Barrett of Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Professors Oliver Salge and David Antons of the School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, and Professor Rajiv Kohli of Raymond A. Mason School of Business, The College of William and Mary.

SIGHealth is a special interest group of the Association for Information Systems. All entries for the SIGHealth Best Paper Award 2019 were assessed on innovation, impact, implementation, and appeal and readability. As part of this, the judges considered if the entries address a real problem, would improve current practices, and if a significant part of an organisation, population or the world is impacted by the issue.

Justifying Health IT Investments: A Process Model of Framing Practices and Reputational Value looks at how practitioners within two different hospitals assessed the reputational benefit their organisation would gain from investing in IT, and goes on to develop a framework to show how both short term and long term reputational challenges are used when justifying such investments.

The two hospitals in the study were facing different reputational circumstances, with the first wanting to restore their reputation following a failed regulatory inspection failure, and the second being well known nationally and internationally for high quality patient care and wanting to enhance this reputation going forward. Professor Oborn and co-authors looked at the framing practices used in justifying IT investments as well as the different temporal orientations around time – whether decisions were made to overcome past issues, address present issues, or look to the future.

Many congratulations to Professor Oborn on this fantastic achievement. Justifying Health IT Investments: A Process Model of Framing Practices and Reputational Value can be accessed here.

Professor Eivor Oborn joined Warwick Business School in 2012 as Professor of Health Care Management. She is currently the Doctoral Programme Director of the PhD Programme. Her research interests include knowledge translation, multidisciplinary collaboration, organisation theory and change, health service innovation, technology use and health policy reform.