Digital Technologies as antecedents to Process Integration and Dynamic Capabilities in Healthcare: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Healthcare has been in focus over the past decade due to its criticality and continuous revolution. In this digital era, with the advent of various technologies, healthcare is undergoing a massive transformation. This study attempts to analyze the impacts of three major digital technologies which are being adopted in the healthcare sector which are electronic medical records (EMR), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and internet-of-things (IoT) enabled medical wearables in the hospital context. Focusing towards analyzing the impact of these technologies towards process-integration and further towards dynamic capabilities like quality, agility and responsiveness; the study framework is well-grounded by two theoretical-underpinnings - Cybernetic Control theory and Dynamic Capability theory. Questionnaire has been finalized through extant literature review and focused-group-discussion. Empirical investigation has been done with a sample of 154 hospital respondents from four major metro cities from the private tertiary-care hospitals in India. The empirical analysis of the framework is carried out by exploratory-factor-analysis, confirmatory-factor-analysis and structural-equation-modelling. The study outcomes highlight linkages both from technologies to process-integration and further towards dynamic capabilities. This study uniformly analyzes the impacts of the aforementioned digital technologies across Indian private hospitals thereby providing the hospital managers with a framework, influencing superior dynamic capabilities and achieving a competitive edge.