Globetrotting health information systems

Cases from an international network, active in health information systems development and implementation in “developing countries”, are presented in order to show a variety of interplays between the same IT agency and varying local settings. By using the same institutional lens, a theoretically informed view of empirical data is provided. Trajectories of implementation in Ethiopia, Botswana, and India present two different, and often diverging, levels of contextualization of the IT artefact: in the local context and in the (possibly emerging) organizational field of health information systems in “developing countries”. By discussing the emergence of an organizational field of health information systems across “developing countries”, but so far not showing many traces of isomorphism, this paper aims at enlarging the empirical basis of what is considered relevant in information systems research.