It takes two to Tango. The Effects of Internal and External Information Integration on Healthcare Process and Outcomes

Information Systems and Operations Management

Speaker : Hillol BALA

Associate Professor of Information Systems   

Kelley School of Business, Indiana University

HEC Campus - Jouy-En-Josas - Bâtiment V - Salle Bernard Ramanantsoa

Abstract:

Healthcare organizations represent a complex context relying on a vast amount of critical information from internal and external sources for effective execution of clinical processes and engendering favorable patient outcomes. We examine the effects of information technology (IT)- enabled information integration capabilities on healthcare organizations’ clinical process execution performance and subsequent patient outcomes. We conceptualize two facets of information integration capabilities (i.e., ability to use information technologies to share, receive, and synthesize health information across operational units, systems, and stakeholders)—internal and external—and hypothesize that these capabilities will influence clinical process performance (i.e., effective execution of clinical processes in accordance with best practice clinical procedures and standards), which in turn will influence two important patient outcomes—experiential quality and patient satisfaction. We further hypothesize that health information integration capabilities will moderate the relationship between clinical process performance and patient outcomes. Using a 6-year longitudinal dataset gathered from multiple sources, we found support for our key hypotheses (N = 5,808 hospitals in the United States). We found that, in addition to the direct positive effects on clinical process performance and patient outcomes, health information integration capabilities had a moderating effect on the relationship between clinical process performance and patient outcomes suggesting that these capabilities would enhance the effectiveness of clinical processes in engendering favorable patient outcomes. Our findings offer insights on the mechanism of information integration through which IT facilitates and transforms healthcare organizations to be patient-centric.

Presenter’s Bio

Hillol Bala is an Associate Professor of Information Systems, the Fettig/Whirlpool Corporation Faculty Fellow, and the Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Enterprise (IDE) in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. His research interests are IT-enabled business process change and management, IT use, adaptation and impacts, and health IT. His work has appeared in premier academic journals, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, Information Systems Journal, The Information Society, Communications of the ACM, and MISQ Exeucitve. A 2015 article (Chen et al. 2015) published in the Communications of the AIS has ranked him as one of the most productive information systems researchers graduated after year 2000 (based on the number of top journal publications). He has served (or is currently serving) as a senior editor (SE) for the Journal of the AIS (JAIS), as an associate editor (AE) for Information Systems Research, on the editorial review board of Decision Sciences and JAIS, and as a track chair and/or program committee member of major information systems conferences