Improving Quality of Service of Home Healthcare Units with Health Information Technologies

Abstract

Deployment of health information technologies (HITs) provides home care units with the means to generate improvements in accuracy and timeliness of information required to meet dynamic patient demands and provide high quality patient care. Increasing availability of information can also facilitate organisational learning, which leads to the invocation of processes that result in improved responses and decisions. This study examined crucial links between HITs and quality of service provided through an empirical investigation of 252 patients in a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) in a Spanish regional hospital. The study sought to test the relationship between HITs and the quality of service using factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate how HITs mediate effects of organisational learning on quality of service. Findings support the notion that the relationship between organisational learning and quality of service can be mediated by HITs. This study provides HHU managers with guidelines for understanding the role of organisational learning processes with respect to HITs and quality of service.