Introducing new technology into hospitals: A case study of pharmacy automation during hospital restructuring

The process of introducing new technology into a hospital was examined from an organizational standpoint. Factors that have been identified in the literature as having an effect on the implementation of new technology include those related to the type of organization into which the new technology is introduced, employee factors such as organizational commitment, job involvement and attitude towards technology, and technological factors such as usability. The pharmacy staff and nurses from two nursing units in a 215-bed Canadian bilingual French/English acute-care hospital were interviewed and surveyed two weeks prior to the implementation of a new automated oral solids dispensing machine and six months after its implementation. Ten usability experts assessed the software interfaces of the two new computers used to control the machine.;Survey and interview data revealed an organization whose culture and climate was expected to have a negative impact on the introduction of new technology into that organization. The communication between hospital workers and the administration was generally considered poor, and there were divergences between the hospital's written philosophy and goals and what hospital workers said were the hospital's philosophy and goals. The culture of the hospital was found to be more control-oriented than flexibility-oriented. Regression analysis of the Time 2 survey data revealed a strong positive relationship between organizational climate and attitude towards technology, and a negative relationship between continuance commitment and attitude towards technology.;This thesis demonstrates that introducing new technology into a hospital environment can be viewed positively by workers despite a poor organizational climate and poor usability of the technology if the technology is viewed as useful by the workers and is not perceived as a threat to jobs. However, introducing technology that does not receive good usability ratings into a hospital with a poor organizational climate means a missed opportunity to get the best out of both the workers and the technology. The finding that workers who have a more positive attitude towards technology are also not as committed to staying with the organization bears further investigation.