Leveraging big data analytics to improve quality of care in health care: A FSQCA approach

Abstract

Academics across disciplines such as information systems, computer science and healthcare informatics highlight that big data analytics (BDA) have the potential to provide tremendous benefits for healthcare industries. Nevertheless, healthcare organizations continue to struggle to make progress on their BDA initiatives. Drawing on the configuration theory, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to explore the impact of BDA on improving quality of care in health care. Specifically, we investigate how BDA capabilities interact with complementary organizational resources and organizational capabilities in multiple configurations to achieve higher quality of care. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), which is a relatively new approach, was employed to identify five different configurations that lead to higher quality of care. These findings offer evidence to suggest that a range of solutions leading to better healthcare performance can indeed be identified through the effective use of BDA and other organizational elements.