Enhancing clinical decision support through information processing capabilities and strategic IT alignment

Hospitals heavily invest in Healthcare IT to improve the efficiency of hospital operations, improve practitioner performance and to enhance patient care. The literature suggests that decision support systems may contribute to these benefits in clinical practice. By building upon the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), we claim that hospitals that invest in a so-called information processing capacity (IPC)—the ability to gather complete patient data and information and enhance clinical processes—will substantially enhance their clinical decision support capability (CDSC). After controlling for common method bias, we use Partial Least Squares SEM to analyze our primary claim. Following the resource and capability-based view of the firm, we test our hypotheses on a cross-sectional data sample of 720 European hospitals. We find that there is a positive association between a hospital’s IPC and clinical decision support capability (CDSC). IT alignment moderates this relationship. All included control variables showed nonsignificant results. Extant research has not been able to identify those IT-enabled capabilities that strengthen CDSC in hospital practice. This study contributes to this particular gap in the literature and advances our understanding of how to efficaciously deploy CDSC in clinical practice.