Can Health Care Information Technology Save Babies?

Abstract

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) facilitate fast and accurate access to patient records, which could improve diagnosis and patient monitoring. Using a 12-year countylevel panel, we find that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with EMRs reduces neonatal mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is driven by a reduction of deaths from conditions requiring careful monitoring. We also find a strong decrease in mortality when we instrument for EMRs adoption using variation in state medical privacy laws. Rough cost-effectiveness calculations suggest that EMRs are associated with a cost of $531,000 per baby's life saved.

Health Information Exchange, System Size and Information Silos

“…We are not able to exploit these supplementary questions as a panel because three years of data is too short to measure effects. This is because of the two-year lead time for IT implementations (Miller and Tucker, 2011a), and the antitrust scrutiny attendant on hospital system mergers and acquisitions, meaning that system size does not change rapidly.…”

“…The need for information exchange in healthcare is pressing, due to growing evidence that exchanging and sharing patient data can potentially reduce mortality and even reduce costs (Bower, 2005;Walker et al, 2005;Miller and Tucker, 2011a;McCullough et al, 2011). The success of efforts to leverage 'big data' in healthcare, such as the 'learning health' system (Smith et al, 2012), will depend crucially on the willingness of providers to share their data (Goodby et al, 2010).…”

Health information exchange, system size and information silos

“…Nowhere has this need been more pressing than in healthcare, where there is growing evidence that exchanging and sharing patient data can potentially reduce mortality and even reduce costs (Bower, 2005;Walker et al, 2005;Miller and Tucker, 2011). However, it is unclear what steps policy makers and technology vendors should take to best ensure that information exchange actually happens.…”

“…We are not able to exploit these supplementary questions as a panel because three years of data is too short to measure effects. This is because of the long lead time for IT implementations (around 2 years (Miller and Tucker, 2011).) and the antitrust scrutiny attendant on hospital system mergers and acquisitions.…”

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

“…In particular, previous studies have focused on mortality among Medicare patients as the primary health outcome, and large-scale studies generally have focused only on the Medicare population. The lone large-scale study that we are aware of using data from nonMedicare patients is Miller and Tucker (2011), who find that the availability of EMRs within a county decreases infant mortality rates.…”