Exploring health-analytics adoption in indian private healthcare organizations: An institutional-theoretic perspective

In India, private hospitals are at the cusp of adopting health-analytics (HA) technology to manage their organizational performance through data-driven decision-making. Past studies have analyzed the applications and benefits of HA. Our study builds on this descriptive base to investigate the patterns of HA adoption and the institutional factors which impact adoption. We conducted a cross-sectional field study that involved ten Indian private healthcare organizations and four health-ecosystem partners and analyzed the case study data using an institutional theory lens. Our cases reveal that the breadth and depth of HA adoption varies and falls into three distinct patterns: far-sighted, conservative, and niche. We assess how these patterns are influenced by the two key dimensions of institutional environments (material-resource environment and institutional environment). We highlight distinctive factors (management support for building organizational trust on data-driven decisions and IT-Medical practitioner collaboration) that exert important contextual influences on HA adoption. Our study identifies areas of commonalty for HA adoption across national healthcare settings as well as contextual aspects representative of the burgeoning Indian healthcare field.