Investigating the impact of routinized health information technology on hospital effectiveness and quality of care

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Jimmy Howard Jenkins Jr. (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Rahul Singh

Abstract: Between 2008 and 2018, US hospitals invested over $35B on Health Information Technology (HIT) in an effort to improve safety, satisfaction, and health outcomes of the patients while simultaneously reducing costs of care. Information Systems (IS) researchers have studied the impact of individual HIT systems on the cost and quality of care and found mixed results across dimensions of health outcomes, patient satisfaction and the cost of care. The healthcare literature shows that patient complexity, arising from patients’ multiple comorbidities as well as from social and economic factors, has a significant impact on patients’ health outcomes as well as on hospital financial outcomes. Yet, most HIT research does not directly consider the impact of patient complexity on patients’ health outcomes or on the cost of care. This research only controls for clinical complexity as measured by case mix index. We use the theoretical lens of organizational information processing and econometric analysis techniques to investigate whether routinized HIT interventions are effective in mitigating the impact of multidimensional patient complexity on cost and quality of care outcomes. Routinized HIT refers to the inextricably interwoven patterns of clinical work and HIT embodied in routines employed by hospitals. Using 4 years of panel data for 5,101 US hospitals. We obtained mixed results when measuring the effect of routinized HIT on cost of care. We found the multidimensional operationalization of patient complexity to be useful for identifying areas of concern and found the moderating effect of use of routinized HIT in hospitals to be most effective for extreme cases of clinical, and social complexity.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2022
Keywords
Healthcare, Information Processing, Information Technology, Patient Complexity
Subjects
Medical informatics
Medical records $x Data processing
Medical care $x Quality control
Medical care $x Cost control

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