Technological Innovation as a Strategic tool for Achieving the Sustainability of Emergency Healthcare Services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The pressure on emergency healthcare services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to be operationally efficient, cost-effective, and responsive to growing demand has also been mounting, but there has been little empirical evidence on the role of technological innovation in its long-term sustainability. This knowledge gap has limited strategic decision-making in matters related to do with technology investments in emergency care systems. It was necessary to deal with this challenge to facilitate sustainable healthcare provision in a context of nationwide national health change agendas. The main aim of the research was to discuss technological innovation as a strategic option to attain the sustainability of emergency healthcare services in Saudi Arabia and define the technological aspects that have the greatest impact on the sustainable results. The research design used was a quantitative cross-sectional study, and 420 healthcare workers working in emergency departments of both state and privately-owned hospitals were sampled. Technological innovation and sustainability were measured by the use of validated Likert-scale instruments in structured questionnaires. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, Pearson correlation, multiple regression, hierarchical regression, and independent samples t-tests were used to analyse the data. The findings demonstrated that technological innovation had a positive and strong relation to emergency healthcare sustainability (r = 0.71, p < 0.001). The technological innovation was found to account for 62% of the variance in the sustainability outcome (R 2 = 0.62), with electronic health records (68) and automation tools (68) coming out as the best predictors. The level of innovation and sustainability in the case of the private hospitals was much more impressive in comparison with that of the public hospitals (p < 0.001). Altogether, the results proved that a strategic implementation of digital health technologies was a crucial enhancement of the sustainability of the emergency healthcare services that can be applied to healthcare policy, managerial decisions, and the following studies.