Determinants of IT adoption in hospitals: IT maturity surveyed in an European context.

Following the increase of investments in Information Technology (IT) in organizations and companies during the past decade, hospitals are expected to increase their IT maturity as well. But what drives hospitals to invest in IT, in particular integrative and enterprise-wide IT? In the present study we make an attempt to identify key elements of IT adoption for the hospital enterprise, and formulate a model in order to assess their level of IT adoption and maturity. Driven by this model and based on survey data from an European research conducted on 18 countries, statistical analysis is performed. It indicates that IT adoption in hospitals is strongly related to size, i.e. the number of employees and the number of beds of a hospital. Additionally, it is revealed that there are significant differences in adoption levels between general and specialized health care hospitals. Finally, a cross-country analysis shows striking differences between the 18 EU countries in the IT maturity of hospitals as well, from which pioneering as well as the straggling clusters of countries can be classified.(aut. ref.