Structural Factors Influencing the Standardization Process in Acute Care Hospitals

This paper is an attempt to explain how structural integration, innovativeness, and Information Technology (IT) capability influence the standardization process in acute care hospitals. Using the covariance structural equation modeling along with confirmatory factor analysis to measure the theoretical constructs for the data on acute care hospitals in the United States, the authors demonstrate that IT capability, hospital-physician integration, and innovativeness directly affected the variability in standardization. The authors recommend further studies to explore how standardization may mediate the relationship between the structural variables and hospital performance variables as standardization becomes more common through institutional isomorphism via coercive, mimetic, and normative mechanisms.