Abstract

The Institute of Medicine has stressed the need for health care organizations to increase their use of information technology (IT) to create safer health care environments, particularly in the area of medication safety. However, the rate of successful organizational IT innovation remains low and this is primarily attributed to a lack of organizational IT innovation readiness. The reported study completes the fourth phase in the development of the 48-item Organizational Information Technology Innovation Readiness Scale (OI-TIRS). The aim of this study was to re-examine the psychometric adequacy of the OITIRS to determine the readiness of three community hospitals to implement a commercial computerized provider order entry (CPOE) medication safety system. Findings supported internal consistency reliability with alpha coefficients from .78 to .92, and mean interitem correlations for the eight subscales ranging from .38 to .65 with a significance level of .01. Construct validity was supported with an overall factor loading range of .49 to .92 across the eight subscales and an explained variance ranged from 33% to 66%. The study findings supported the use of the OITIRS to assess hospital readiness for computer provider order entry system innovation.