How a flexible collaboration infrastructure impacts healthcare information exchange

Exchanging health information and data is considered to be critical for modern hospital operations. Research shows that exchanging, e.g., laboratory results, clinical summaries, and medication lists, across the boundaries of hospitals, will improve the efficiency, quality, costeffectiveness, and even safety of healthcare practices. However, views and strategies differ on how hospitals can facilitate or enable this exchange process, given the high dynamics of technology and IT developments. We explore a hypothesized relationship between a flexible collaboration infrastructure and health information and data exchange. This study builds on the resource-based view of the firm and subsequently tests two hypotheses using PLS-SEM analysis on a sample of 983 European hospitals. We find that there is a significant positive relationship between flexible collaboration infrastructures and health information and data exchange. Hospitals’ security measures to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data conditions this relationship.