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Background:
While aiming for the same goal of building a national eHealth Infrastructure, Germany and the United States pursued different strategic approaches – particularly regarding the role of promoting the adoption and usage of hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR).
Objective:
To measure and model the diffusion dynamics of EHRs in German hospital care and to contrast the results with the developments in the US.
Materials and methods:
All acute care hospitals that were members of the German statutory health system were surveyed during the period 2007–2017 for EHR adoption. Bass models were computed based on the German data and the corresponding data of the American Hospital Association (AHA) from non-federal hospitals in order to model and explain the diffusion of innovation.
Results:
While the diffusion dynamics observed in the US resembled the typical s-shaped curve with high imitation effects (q = 0.583) but with a relatively low innovation effect (p = 0.025), EHR diffusion in Germany stagnated with adoption rates of approx. 50% (imitation effect q = -0.544) despite a higher innovation effect (p = 0.303).
Discussion:
These findings correlate with different governmental strategies in the US and Germany of financially supporting EHR adoption. Imitation only seems to work if there are financial incentives, e.g. those of the HITECH Act in the US. They are lacking in Germany, where the government left health IT adoption strategies solely to the free market and the consensus among all of the stakeholders.
Conclusion:
Bass diffusion models proved to be useful for distinguishing the diffusion dynamics in German and US non-federal hospitals. When applying the Bass model, the imitation parameter needs a broader interpretation beyond the network effects, including driving forces such as incentives and regulations, as was demonstrated by this study.
Radiology has a reputation for having a high affinity to innovation – particularly with regard to information technologies. Designed for supporting the peculiarities of radiological diagnostic workflows, Radiology Information Systems (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) developed into widely used information systems in hospitals and form the basis for advancing the field towards automated image diagnostics. RIS and PACS can thus serve as meaningful indicators of how quickly IT innovations diffuse in secondary care settings – an issue that requires increased attention in research and health policy in the light of increasingly fast innovation cycles. We therefore conducted a retrospective longitudinal observational study to research the diffusion dynamics of RIS and PACS in German hospitals between 2005 and 2017. Based upon data points collected within the “IT Report Healthcare” and building on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory, we applied a novel methodological technique by fitting Bayesian Bass Diffusion Models on past adoption rates. The Bass models showed acceptable goodness of fit to the data and the results indicated similar growth rates of RIS and PACS implementations and suggest that market saturation is almost reached. Adoption rates of PACS showed a slightly higher coefficient of imitation (q = 0.25) compared to RIS (q = 0.11). However, the diffusion process expands over approximately two decades for both systems which points at the need for further research into how innovation diffusion can be accelerated effectively. Furthermore, the Bayesian approach to Bass modelling showed to have several advantages over the classical frequentists approaches and should encourage adoption and diffusion research to adapt similar techniques.
Despite similar policy goals, the adoption of eHealth practices took different paths in Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH), and Germany (GER). We seek to provide a rigorous analysis of the current state of hospitals by focusing on three key eHealth areas: electronic patient records (EPR), health information exchange (HIE), electronic patient communication. For validation and in order to gain better contextual insight we applied a mixed method approach by combining survey results from clinical directors with qualitative interview data from eHealth experts of all three countries. Across countries, EPR adoption rates were reported highest (AT: 52%, CH: 78%, GER: 50%), HIE-rates were partly lower (AT: 52%, CH: 14%, GER: 17%), and electronic patient communication was reported lowest overall (AT: 17%, CH: 8%, GER: 19%). Amongst others, results indicate patient awareness about eHealth to be equally weak across countries, which thus may be an important focal point of future policy initiatives.
Although user participation may facilitate the realisation of IT innovations, various literature analyses show only minimal to moderate evidence for such effects possibly due to disregard of mediating factors. Against this background, this study examines the extent to which joint intrapreneurship of clinical leaders and IT leaders as well as a distinct innovation culture mediate the effect of user participation on hospitals’ IT innovativeness. IT innovativeness was measured by the availability and usability of IT functions and by the perceived ‘innovative power’ of a hospital. An empirical model was developed and tested with data from 168 clinical leaders and IT leaders who participated pairwise in a survey representing 84 German hospitals. Three parallel mediation analyses indicated that the participation of users could only lead to IT innovativeness if they were accompanied by intrapreneurial leadership on the part of clinical directors and IT leaders and if a pronounced innovation culture prevailed.