EXAMINING TWO DIMENSIONS OF TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION AND HOSPITAL PERFORMANCE

Abstract

This study examines the hospital performance implications of the different technology adoption behaviors in a hospital setting. Drawing on biodiversity concept in Ecology, this study includes two features (diversity and velocity) of technology adoption behavior to describe different ways of technology adoption. Diversity describes how different technologies are adopted in a hospital, while velocity describes the change of HIT diversity over time (i.e., the pace of technology addition). With longitudinal data on more than 3300 US hospitals spanning five years, this work explored technology adoption behaviors from an empirical taxonomic approach to determine whether the hospitals in the data could be distinguished by the two technology adoption dimensions. The clustering results show that three homogeneous classes of technology adoption behaviors exist according to these dimensions. Also, the study examines the association between the two dimensions and hospital performance. It used a dynamic panel model with GMM estimation to mitigate the bias from reverse causality. The results show the positive relationship between HIT diversity and hospital performance, while the velocity of HIT diversity change had a negative association with hospital performance.