Health Care Executives: The Association between External Factors, Use, and Their Perceptions of Health Information Technology

Over the past 30 years, researchers have demonstrated that health care information technology can improve patient safety and quality of care. More recently, attention has turned increasingly to the role of information and communication technology as a means to improve clinical decision-making, and organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Despite these streams of research, there is a lack of investigations that look at why and how health care executives leverage HIT. In this paper, the researchers investigate the factors, such as working in a JCAHO certified organization, that impact health care executives’ degree of HIT use in their workplace. The analysis of data collected suggests that there are varying degrees of HIT use among health care executives. Further analysis of the data indicates that, even though the executives in general believe in usefulness of HIT for better service delivery, those beliefs are not a factor in their intent to use HIT in their workplace.