Title: The impact of IT adoption on hospital staffing and payroll

Authors: Marion G. Sobol, Gordon N. Smith

Addresses: Information Systems and Operations Management Department, Edwin, L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA. Siemens Pyramid, Dallas, TX, USA

Abstract: The paper relates three measures of hospital efficiency ratio of employees to patients, employees to filled beds, and payroll to total expense for adoptions of business and medical IT innovations in 107 hospitals. Allowances are made for hospital size, profit orientation and average patient stay, in a study of the introduction of six business and seven medical information technologies. The purpose of the innovation transactional, informational and strategic are introduced in determining economic effects of the technologies. Adoption of business technologies and particularly transactional technologies tends to lower the ratios. Adoption of medical technology generally tends to raise all these ratios. For profit hospitals realise more efficiency from their business transactional adoptions than do government and not-for-profit institutions. Most savings were obtained from adopting a relatively mature technology in the business transactional area. The adoption of at least one technology affects labour efficiency, but the number of technologies adopted has little additional effect. Adoption of medical technologies both transactional and informational tends to raise the test ratios, indicating that another measure for efficiency of medical IT adoptions such as ability to diagnose or treat patients| needs to be developed.

Keywords: information systems in healthcare; economics of healthcare IS; IT payoff; hospital staffing; hospital payroll.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHTM.2001.001106

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 2001 Vol.3 No.1, pp.75-93

Published online: 30 Jun 2003 *

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