The effect of health it investments on regional health care costs

Hilal Atasoy, Pei Yu Chen, Kartik K. Ganju

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between health IT investments and regional health care costs. We focus on the regional level effects, which take into account externalities that arise from patient mobility. We find that the relationship between health IT and costs are stronger at a regional level than hospital level, confirming the presence of externality of health IT investments. This finding has important implications: it suggests that hospital level analysis underestimates the benefits of health IT investments and can lead to suboptimal investment decision from the society's point of view. We also find that cost reduction impacts of health IT investment are higher over the long term. We present evidence that advanced IT applications that enable within hospital communication are more beneficial in more urban areas. Higher software integration among the adopting hospitals further decreases the health care costs in the area by enabling electronic medical record sharing. In addition, we show that not all hospitals have to make same level of IT investment to obtain optimal reductions in health care costs. Instead, having some leading hospitals in health IT investments can be more beneficial.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationECIS 2014 Proceedings - 22nd European Conference on Information Systems
PublisherAssociation for Information Systems
ISBN (Print)9780991556700
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2014 - Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: Jun 9 2014Jun 11 2014

Publication series

NameECIS 2014 Proceedings - 22nd European Conference on Information Systems

Conference

Conference22nd European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2014
Country/TerritoryIsrael
CityTel Aviv
Period6/9/146/11/14

Keywords

  • Health IT
  • Impact of IT

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