Date of Award

Fall 11-1-2013

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Science in Information Systems

Department

Business and Information Systems

First Advisor

Surendra Sarnikar

Second Advisor

Omar El-Gayar

Third Advisor

Dorine Bennett

Fourth Advisor

Viki Johnson

Abstract

Healthcare organizations continue to make large investments in health information technology to improve quality of care and lower costs. Therefore, there is an ever-growing need to have an ever-clearer understanding of how IT investments impact these organizations. However, there are no methodologies designed to identify and then leverage these effects to promote healthcare quality. In this research, I present an extensive review of the literature on the impact of health information technology on the quality of care. A research gap is identified where past studies have explored the impact of individual technologies or aggregate all technologies based on overall investment, but do not explore the impact of specific portfolios of information technology and their synergistic effects on healthcare quality. Based on the past studies on portfolio theory, I introduce an approach, utilizing data mining techniques and logistical regression, to identify such optimal portfolios, and explore the presence of such synergistic effects among the components of the portfolio. This multi-step approach is then applied to publically-available datasets, and the resulting candidate IT portfolios are presented. Statistical analysis, controlling for specialty, ownership, size and case mix, is then used to test these results and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. The results of this approach identify optimal portfolios for each of the healthcare metrics under study. Additionally, results from alternate analytical methods including cluster analysis and stepwise regression are also examined. Review of these results offers further support to the proposed approach. This approach identified 16 portfolios across the six healthcare metrics studied. The primary contribution of this research is a new multi-step approach to identify optimal portfolios of information technology systems through the identification of intersystem synergies. This approach bridges three domains by borrowing well-established and commonly-accepted constructs from the information technology, business and healthcare arenas. Secondarily, the synergistic effects identified through the application of this approach offer insights into the use of current IT systems, as well as provide guidance in the development of future systems.

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