مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Innovations in healthcare organizations can stem from the provision of new services, of new ways of providing care and/or from the adoption of new technologies. Technological innovation is expected to be beneficial both for the patient and for the healthcare organization, giving rise to better health outcomes, higher quality of care, and enhanced efficiency of internal operations (Länsisalmi et al., 2006). Although innovation remains fundamental in developing the quality of healthcare, reduced budgets and ensuing cost-cutting measures have pushed towards the adoption of health technologies that can improve operations by enabling efficiency and competitiveness. For instance, new medical equipment to be used in diagnosis and treatment of patients is required not only to guarantee better patient outcomes, but also to increase the productivity of hospital providers, and to reduce costs stemming from hospital errors, readmissions, and patient claims. Likewise, information technologies, while reducing the risk of hospital errors and allowing more accurate diagnoses by enabling consultations among physicians, contribute to enhance productivity by leading to significant savings of money and time (Sharma et al., 2016).

In this direction, the significant financial investment often involved in the acquisition of new technology calls for the estimation of the impact of technology on the healthcare organization performance, in order to establish what the payoffs are. There is, however, limited evidence on how the purchase of medical and information technology by hospitals is related to indicators concerning activity levels, finance, and quality, especially at the micro level (Chaudhry et al., 2006).

In addition, the adoption of technology in the healthcare sector presents other complex challenges relating to organizational, social and psychological aspects (Shortell et al., 2001), which must be carefully managed. The fact that new technology needs to be adopted and adapted to the specific organizational context and that this process of adaptation takes time, has been widely acknowledged in the literature (Devaraj and Kohli, 2003). In the same vein, new technology may require a change in the behaviours of clinicians (Venkatesh et al., 2003) or in current medical practices, requiring efforts at the group and at the individual levels (Ren et al., 2008).