As healthcare organizations rely more heavily on IT, there is a growing need to understand innovative IT use in these organizations. First, this research introduces the concept of ehealth absorptive capacity which consists of e-health entrepreneurial alertness, assimilation and exploitation, based on Cohen and Levinthal (1990)’s absorptive capacity theory. We then address the theoretical neglected question of how and why the e-health entrepreneurial alertness influences e-health exploitation. Finally we use the theory of transaction cost economics to identify relational governance and contractual governance and theorize the relative impacts of the relational and contractual governances across e-health absorptive capacity processes. Based on data collected from the 182 senior management from104 healthcare organizations, we found 1) greater e-health entrepreneurial alertness enhanced ehealth exploitation in the e-health context by enhancing e-health assimilation, 2) relational and contractual governances each had a stronger impact on e-health absorptive capacity, 3) relational governance had a stronger impact on the early stage (i.e., e-health entrepreneurial alertness) of the absorptive capacity process than contractual governance and contractual governance has a greater impact on the later stage (i.e., e-health assimilation and e-health exploitation) than relational governance. Our findings provide insights on concern with ehealth capability development and managing e-health implementation.
關聯:
Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Information Systems
