Access patterns to a website on healthcare IT failure

Organizational and human factors issues associated with healthcare IT have led to project difficulties and failures. Detailed case accounts might improve knowledge sharing between healthcare organizations on lessons learned and best implementation practices. We conducted a study of access patterns to a website created by our first author that explicitly addresses the issue of health IT failure via highly detailed case accounts in an 'anonymized' format. We found that our website is one of few relevant sites that is retrieved via major search engine queries on "healthcare IT failure" or related concepts, and we hypothesize that "hits" on our website may reflect a significant portion of the demand for information on this issue. We then studied the demographics and queries used by viewers of our website via a public website-tracking utility (no personally-identifiable information was obtained). We found that demand for information on healthcare IT difficulty and failure via the Web is ongoing by searchers of a variety of demographics, and we believe the demand is largely unmet. The medical informatics community can contribute to filling this gap.