Just What the Doctor Ordered? Physician Mobility After the Adoption of Electronic Health Records

Although significant research has examined the effect of enterprise information systems on the behavior and careers of employees, the majority of this work has been devoted to the study of blue and grey collar workers, with little attention paid to the transformative effect IT may have on high status professionals. In this paper, we begin to bridge this gap by examining how highly skilled professionals react to the increasing presence of technology within their organizations. Specifically, we investigate how the implementation of electronic health record systems (EHRs) affects physician mobility and the decision to continue practicing at their current hospital. Results from a census of physicians in the state of Florida suggest that when these enterprise systems create complementarities for the physician, their tenure at the focal organization increases significantly. However, when technologies are disruptive to the physician’s routines, there is a pronounced exodus from the organization. Interestingly, d...