Disaggregating the Differential Impact of Healthcare IT in Complex Care Delivery: Insights from Field Research in Chronic Care

Abstract

This study focuses on the impact of digitizing medical information on the efficiency and perceived quality of chronic care delivery at the individual physician level. This study extends the theory of task technology fit to activity systems consisting of highly interdependent tasks. We find that the outcomes of efficiency and quality gains are driven by the structure of interdependencies between tasks that physicians perform. While structured information plays a key role in enabling both decision-making and task execution, we find that physician-created semistructured information is also an important predictor of both efficiency and quality gains. We show that the structure of activity systems (task interdependencies) has a strong moderating influence on the factors that drive efficiency and quality gains. We find that digitization enables physicians to preprocess patients’ records prior to their visit which in turn drives gains in both the efficiency and the perceived quality of care delivered.