An organizational learning perspective on the assimilation of electronic medical records among small physician practices

John L Reardon and Elizabeth Davidson

European Journal of Information Systems, 2007, vol. 16, issue 6, 681-694

Abstract: Small physician practices play an essential role in the healthcare delivery system but are least likely to adopt health information technologies such as electronic medical records (EMRs). Factors contributing to low adoption include investment cost, productivity loss, and lack of financial incentives. However, these factors do not explain why some small practices, which face similar challenges nonetheless assimilate EMRs, while others do not. We investigated the assimilation of EMRs from the theoretic perspective of organizational learning in a survey of small physician practices and evaluated whether characteristics associated with organizational learning barriers are related to EMR assimilation. We found that learning-related scale, related knowledge, and diversity were positively associated with small physician practices' stage of assimilation of EMR technology. Our findings suggest that some small practices are able to overcome the substantial learning barriers presented by EMRs but that others will require support to develop sufficient learning capacity. We consider implications for practice from this research and areas requiring further research.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000714 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:16:y:2007:i:6:p:681-694

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000714

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().