Identifying Optimal IT Portfolios to Promote Healthcare Quality

Healthcare organizations continue to make large investments in health information technology to improve quality of care and lower costs. Therefore, there is an evergrowing need to have an ever-clearer understanding of how IT investments impact these organizations. In this paper, we present an extensive review of literature on the impact of health information technology on quality. We identify a research gap 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, we then develop an approach for identifying such optimal portfolios and exploring the presence of such synergistic effects among the components of the portfolio. We then present preliminary results to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.