Adoption, Usage and Efficiency: Benchmarking Healthcare IT in Private Practices

In the past few decades various industries have adopted new information systems and supply chain management techniques. Unfortunately, although many industries saw significant gains, the health care industry—both large hospitals and small private practices—are slow to consider new technologies. According to the Health Care Information Technology Model (HCIT) and the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model, a necessary aspect in planning and applying new IT and supply chain techniques is the ability to compare and benchmark the organization. Whereas some research is available for hospitals (Malin, 2006), little work has been done for private medical practices. In this paper, the authors benchmark IT practices in terms of staffing efficiency and importance of usage to compare medical practices in the United States and Taiwan. The authors develop a set of efficiency measures for private medical practices that they correlate with types of IT usage, barriers to IT usage and extent of IT usage.