Alternative Title

Direct and spillover effects of patient access to health information exchange on medical costs: A natural experiment

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

12-2019

Abstract

Health information exchange (HIE) is presumed to reduce medical costs by facilitating information sharing across healthcare providers. Existing studies focused on different medical costs or one set of costs, and resulted in mixed findings. We examine the effects of patient access to HIE on two of the most important medical costs of a hospitalization episode - test costs and medication costs - through a natural experiment and the discharge data of a hospital. Besides the negative direct effect of access to HIT on tests costs, we also find its positive spillover effect on medication costs, such that more patients having access to HIE in a department would increase the medication costs of patients in the same department. We posit that these spillover effects are caused by income loss but could be mitigated through efficiency improvements. Our analyses confirm our theoretical hypotheses. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords

health information exchange, patient access, spillover effect, income effect

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Medical Sciences

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

ICIS 2019: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Information Systems, Munich, Germany, December 15-17

First Page

1

Last Page

17

Publisher

AIS

City or Country

Illinois

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