innovative idea would give them a relative competitive advantage.
Studies indicate that besides relative advantage, perceived complexity
and compatibility of the new technology also influence its adoption
decision. For example, although electronic medical records (EMRs)
have been around since the early 1960s, until recently they were not
adopted extensively by the majority of healthcare management
organizations (Walker, 2006) because of the complexity of maintaining
the electronic medical records of the patients.
2.3. IT uses in the decision making process in healthcare organizations
Healthcare relies on timely use of information (Nemeth and Cook,
2007). For example, information technology (IT) has been used by
healthcare organizations to support billing and healthcare records of
patients. IT support helps practitioners identify the medical error, if
there is one, in the patient healthcare records and could prevent the
occurrence of catastrophic sequences, such as high medical costs,
denial of necessary medical treatments to those who need it,
unnecessary infection, and even death. The patient information
collected using healthcare IT systems helps medical practitioners in
the decision making process. Such healthcare IT systems can also be
used “to inform workers and managers about changes to workplace
vulnerabilities and new means that may be available to meet
challenges, such as widely varying demand” (Nemeth and Cook,
2007, p. 3408). Use of such timely and accurate information allows
managers in the decision-making processes to properly allocate scant
organizational resources, so better treatment can be provided to
patients in a timely manner. This increases the healthcare efficiency and enables the organization and individuals to achieve highly
reliable performance in a dynamic and an unpredictable environment.
2.4. Rolling out the innovation
In this hostile environment, organizational members' innovative
behavior is usually dependent upon managements' abilities. Many
innovation studies have indicated inconsistent findings regarding the
rolling out of innovations in an organization. A study conducted by
Zmud (1982) which sought to understand the impact of centralization
and formalization on organizational innovation found mixed results.
The findings of that study indicate that “factors found to influence
innovative behaviors in one context may be seen to have little, or an
opposite, influence in another context” (p. 1421).
Studies indicate that to roll out innovation in an effective way
management should maintain a positive relationship with their
employees (Vogus and Welbourne, 2003). To maintain such relationships,
management should engage in extensive information sharing
across organizational levels by applying a bottom–up approach rather
than emphasizing a top–down approach. According to the literature, a
bottom–up approach is defined as the flow of information from a