Assessing the Relationship between Hospital Process Digitalization and Hospital Quality - Evidence from Germany

Hospital digitalization aims to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and/ or improve quality of care. To assess a digitalization-quality relationship, we investigate the association between process digitalization and process and outcome quality. We use data from the German DigitalRadar (DR) project from 2021 and combine these data with two process (preoperative waiting time for osteosynthesis and hip replacement surgery after femur fracture, n = 516 and 574) and two outcome quality indicators (mortality ratio of patients hospitalized for outpatient-acquired pneumonia, n = 1,074; ratio of new decubitus cases, n = 1,519). For each indicator, we run a univariate and a multivariate regression. We measure process digitalization holistically by specifying three models with different explanatory variables: (1) the total DR-score (0 (not digitalized) to 100 (fully digitalized)), (2) the sum of DR-score sub-dimensions' scores logically associated with an indicator, and (3) sub-dimensions' separate scores. For the process quality indicators, all but one of the associations are insignificant. A greater DR-score is weakly associated with a lower mortality ratio of pneumonia patients (p < 0.10 in the multivariate regression). In contrast, higher process digitalization is significantly associated with a higher ratio of decubitus cases (p < 0.01 for models (1) and (2), p < 0.05 for two sub-dimensions in model (3)). Regarding decubitus, our finding might be due to better diagnosis, documentation, and reporting of decubitus cases due to digitalization rather than worse quality. Insignificant and inconclusive results might be due to the indicators' inability to reflect quality variation and digitalization effects between hospitals. For future research, we recommend investigating within hospital effects with longitudinal data.