Interest groups and the implementation of electronic health records in the Italian NRRP, between policy and politics

One of the main goals of the Italian National Resilience and Recovery Plan (NRRP) is to modernize the economy and the public sector, including the digitalization of public services. Among the many interventions aimed at achieving this goal, the implementation of a national system of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is both an ambitious and yet overdue objective, having been envisioned for over a decade. Despite the existence of broad agreement on this policy measure, its implementation has turned out to be more challenging than expected, this for constitutional, political and technical reasons. Adopting an interest groups perspective, the aim of this article is to map the positions of the various actors involved in the realization of EHRs in Italy, focusing on the implementation phase of the NRRP, and comparing the two sub-phases corresponding to the different governments in office, namely, the Draghi government (May 2021 – September 2022) and the Meloni government (since October 2022). Having developed a process-tracing analysis, we find that political claims and factors became more salient in the second phase, especially as regards the role of ICT companies in charge of implementing EHRs, despite substantial continuity in terms of policy content.