Impact of hospital size on healthcare information system effectiveness: evidence from healthcare data analytics

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, the increasing use of mobile digital devices and efforts from the whole society, the healthcare information systems (HISs) are moving towards a new era. However, there is still a lack of clear understanding of the benefits of HIS at the hospital level and the influential factors for HIS effectiveness. In this study, we propose a research framework to explain how HIS implementation improves hospital performance. Our results reinforce the positive effect of HIS on hospital performance. In particular, we found that HIS implementation increases both the cost and revenue of the hospitals, but the increasing effect in revenue is much bigger than the increasing effect in cost. We also found that although both small and big hospitals benefit from the implementation of HIS, the effect of size is different. Size has a positive effect on hospital performance for small hospitals but has a negative effect on big hospitals. This indicates that the competitive advantage of economies of scale disappears for big hospitals because the level of information transparency becomes lower and transaction costs become higher as size increases.