Impacts of Hospital Complexity on Experiential Quality: Mitigating Roles of Information Technology

ABSTRACT Hospitals today are posed with many requirements arising from government regulations and financial incentives to improve patient experiential quality. An administrative challenge thus results from hospital complexity, which can circumvent efforts to enhance experiential quality. This study examines associations of two dimensions of hospital complexity (i.e., hospital safety and patient case mix) with patient‐level experiential quality. The study also investigates how health information technology (IT), via clinical IT and administrative IT, differently mitigates the two dimensions of complexity. Using unique proprietary secondary data sources, we assemble a patient‐level experiential quality dataset. The dataset enables us to simultaneously examine hospital and individual patient factors that may affect experiential quality of individual patients. The findings indicate that a hospital's service variety and case mix are both negatively associated with experiential quality. Although not directly affecting experiential quality, administrative IT mitigates the negative associations of both types of complexity with experiential quality. Post hoc analyses reveal nuanced relationships between hospital complexity, IT, and disaggregated experiential quality dimensions.