The Impact of Knowledge from Learning-About Electronic Health Records on IT Innovation Adoption : The Moderating Role of Absorptive Capacity

Learning-by-doing is a crucial process to successful IT adoption. Yet, this type of organizational learning process is necessary but not sufficient to the adoption success. Learning-about, the pre-adoption learning activity, plays an equally important role in an organization’s IT adoption. In healthcare industry, hospitals are not always able to utilize healthcare information technologies (HITs), such as electronic healthcare records (EHRs), to generate high quality information for decision making. Having pre-adoption knowledge and the capacity to absorb the knowledge is likely to better the adoption results. This research proposes a conceptual model to explain the importance of the knowledge from learning-about EHR technology and explore the role absorptive capacity plays in EHR pre-adoption. This study contributes to the existing EHR literature by (1) adding pre-adoption knowledge into the ingredients of successful adoption, and (2) discussing the moderating effect of absorptive capacity to the relationship between pre-adoption knowledge and outcomes of adoption