TY  - JOUR
AU  - McCullough,Jeffery S.
AU  - Parente,Stephen
AU  - Town,Robert
TI  - Health Information Technology and Patient Outcomes: The Role of Organizational and Informational Complementarities
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18684
PY  - 2013
Y2  - January 2013
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18684
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18684.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeffery S. McCullough
University of Minnesota
MMC 729
420 Delaware St., SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-Mail: mccu0056@umn.edu

Stephen Parente
University of Minnesota
Department of Finance
Carlson School of Management
321 19th Avenue South, Room 3-122
Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-Mail: paren010@umn.edu

Robert Town
Health Care Management Department
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
3641 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
E-Mail: rtown@wharton.upenn.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2013-06-01
AB  - Health information technology (IT) adoption, it is argued, will dramatically improve patient care. We study the impact of hospital IT adoption on patient outcomes focusing on the roles of technological and organizational complements in affecting IT's value and explore underlying mechanisms through which IT facilitates the coordination of labor inputs. We link detailed hospital discharge data on all Medicare fee-for-service admissions from 2002-2007 to detailed hospital-level IT adoption information. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the parameters of interest. For all IT sensitive conditions we find that health IT adoption reduces mortality for the most complex patients but does not affect outcomes for the median patient. This implies that the benefits from IT adoption are skewed to large institutions with a severe case mix. We decompose the impact of health IT into care coordination, clinical information management, and other components. The benefits from health IT are primarily experienced by patients whose diagnoses require cross-specialty care coordination and extensive clinical information management.
ER  -