Agility through Patient Knowledge
: Leveraging IT Ambidexterity in Healtcare

  • R (Reinier) Dickhout

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

The capability of hospitals to sense and response to a changing environment, also known as its patient agility, is regarded as a higher order dynamic capability that may be influenced by lower order IT capabilities according to the dynamic capabilities’ view (DCV). This research has investigated how such IT capabilities, namely the balanced exploitation and exploration of IT resources or IT
ambidexterity, influence this agility and how this relation is mediated by patient knowledge processes. Also, the moderating role of process complexity is evaluated.
A partial least squares structured equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis shows that IT ambidexterity positively impacts patient agility and that this impact is mediated by patient knowledge processes. A moderating effect of process complexity has not been found. A multi-group analysis further indicated that the mediating effect is greater for non-academic, non-top-clinical hospitals.
The results are based on a relatively small sample size (N = 95) and even though current findings indicate that hospital can increase their patient agility and leverage their IT investments by a structured, timely, systematic and cross-functional application of process knowledge processes, further research extending the targeted response group is recommended.
Date of Award22 Jan 2020
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorRogier van de Wetering (Examiner) & Montse Prats López (Co-assessor)

Keywords

  • dynamic capabilities’ view (DCV)
  • IT ambidexterity
  • patient knowledge processes
  • patient agility
  • process complexity
  • PLS-SEM
  • hospitals

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