Abstract
Modern hospitals increasingly make use of innovations and information technology (IT) to improve workflow and patient's clinical journey. Typical innovative solutions include patient records and clinical decision support systems to enhance the process of decision making by doctors and other healthcare practitioners. However, currently, it remains unclear how hospitals could facilitate and enable such a decision support capability in clinical practice. We ground our work on the resource-based view of the firm and put forth the notion of IT-enabled capabilities which emphasizes critical IT investment and capability development areas that hospitals could exploit in their quest to improve clinical decision support. We develop a research model that explains how “health information exchange” and enhanced “information capability” collectively drive a hospital's “clinical decision support capability.” We used partial least squares path modeling on large-scale cross-sectional data from 720 European hospitals. Outcomes suggest that health information exchange positively impacts information capability. In turn, information capability complementary partially mediates the relationship between information exchange and clinical decision support. Hence, this research contributes to the literature on clinical decision support and provides valuable insights into how to support such innovative technologies and capabilities in clinical practice. We conclude with a discussion and conclusion. Also, we outline the inherent limitations of this study and outline directions for future research.
Highlights
Studies linked the effective use of information technology (IT) to productivity benefits in a wide variety of markets and industries, including healthcare [1,2,3]
Following Goh et al [21], Journal of Healthcare Engineering we argue that it is paramount to study these aspects in detail so that this could contribute to our general understanding of IT implementations in hospitals, clinical decision support system (CDSS) in particular
Commission, as e-health is on the policy agenda of the European Commission for more than a decade. e objective of this particular study was to benchmark the level of e-health adoption and use in acute hospitals across 30 countries in Europe. e research approach and associated survey were based on results described in a report by Deloitte/Ipsos (2011) (Deloitte/Ipsos, 2011, eHealth Benchmarking (Phase III): final report for the European Commission, Brussels). e European Hospital Survey intentionally focused on European acute hospitals to guarantee coherence and comparability with the previous investigations
Summary
Studies linked the effective use of information technology (IT) to productivity benefits in a wide variety of markets and industries, including healthcare [1,2,3]. Modern hospitals use IT to transform healthcare delivery processes, and thereby try to improve clinical quality, service efficiency, and patient satisfaction and reduce costs [3,4,5,6,7]. CDSSs are known for their contribution to clinical performance, e.g., the reduction of medication error rates [16], improvements in antibiotic use, cost reduction [17, 18], improvements in drug dosing and preventive care [19], and enhancements of quality [18]. Us, despite the substantial potential for clinical, operational benefits and performance gains from CDSSs, there have been limited studies on the antecedents and mechanisms underlying successful clinical decision support capability (CDSC) deployments in hospitals. Following Goh et al [21], Journal of Healthcare Engineering we argue that it is paramount to study these aspects in detail so that this could contribute to our general understanding of IT implementations in hospitals, CDSSs in particular
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