Week 14 Angst et al _Yiran

Social contagion theory suggests that when performance is uncertainty, decision makers will imitate others within their ecosystem. Such contagion occurs either through the direct transmission of information during interactions between adopters and nonadopters, or via an observational process where managers scrutinize their environment and attend to the adoption decisions of other organizations. Based on social contagion theory,   the author hypothesized a hospital’s likelihood of adopting EMRs as a function of its susceptibility to the influence of prior adopters, its proximity to prior adopters, and the infectiousness or potency of influence exerted by adopting hospitals.

They apply a heterogeneous diffusion model (HBM) technique to perform a temporal analysis of the dynamic contagion process, using archival data from a sample drawn from an annual survey spanning 1975 to 2005 of almost 4,000 U.S. hospitals. 7 out of 9 hypotheses are supported, suggesting that with respect to susceptibility to influence, greater hospital size and age are positively related to the likelihood of adoption for nonadopters. Also, the adoption of EMRs by young and large or old and small hospitals exerts almost no infectious influence on potential adopters, whereas adoption by large, old hospitals is the most contagious.  A  hospital’s “celebrity” status also contributes to its infectiousness. Furthermore, they also find strong effects for social proximity on a hospital’s likelihood of adoption, and regional effects for spatial proximity. In contrast to a view that size and age are impediments in innovation because they create apathy in organizations, maturity provides more opportunities for learning from others.  This study yields important insights into what factors increase the likelihood of adoption of EMRs, which will benefit both practitioners and researchers.