Information Technology and Patient Health: Analyzing Outcomes, Populations, and Mechanisms

This paper examines the effect of hospital adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) on health outcomes, particularly patient safety indicators (PSIs). We find evidence of a positive impact of EMRs on PSIs via decision support rather than care coordination. Consistent with this mechanism, we find an EMR with decision support is more effective at reducing PSIs for less complicated cases, using several different metrics for complication. These findings indicate the negligible impacts for EMRs found by previous studies focusing on the Medicare population and/or mortality do not apply in all settings. JEL Codes: I12, O33 * Seth Freedman is at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, [email protected]. Haizhen Lin is at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, [email protected]. Jeff Prince is at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, [email protected]. We thank Leila Agha, Lenisa Chang, Chris Forman, Shane Greenstein, Avi Goldfarb, Jeffrey McCullough, and participants at NBER SI 2013, WHITE 2013, ASHEcon 2014, IIOC 2014, the University of Massachusetts, and Ball State University for useful discussion and comments. We thank Noah Hammarlund for excellent research assistance. We also acknowledge the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for providing access and assistance to their data. We are responsible for all remaining errors.