南科大信管系助理教授李垚的研究成果被Manufacturing & Service Operations Management期刊接收

2021-02-24

近日，南方科技大学信息系统与管理工程系助理教授李垚与其合作者的文章The Value of Health IT Interoperability: Evidence from Interhospital Transfer of Heart Attack Patients被Manufacturing & Service Operations Management期刊接收并即将发表。该文由李垚与达特茅斯学院Lauren Xiaoyuan Lu 普渡大学Susan Feng Lu以及清华大学Jian Chen合作撰写。

摘要：

Problem definition: Health IT (HIT) interoperability refers to the ability of different electronic health record systems and software applications to communicate exchange data and use the information that has been exchanged. U.S. government has invested heavily to promote HIT interoperability in recent years in an attempt to improve patient outcomes and control healthcare expenditure. This study empirically assesses the value of HIT interoperability in the interhospital transfer process of heart attack patients.

Academic/practical relevance: HIT interoperability is supposed to enable health information exchange between disparate providers. However there exists little evidence about how it affects care delivery processes across providers.

Methodology: Using transfer records of heart attack patients and HIT interoperability adoption records of hospitals in the New York State between 2013 to 2015 we estimate the effect of HIT interoperability on care delivery process measures and patient outcome measures. We demonstrate the robustness of the results using the instrumental variable method the propensity score matching method the difference-in-differences method and a falsification test.

Results: We show that HIT interoperability shortens the throughput time of interhospital transfer by 45.6 minutes on average or 12.0%. Surprisingly we find that HIT interoperability has little effect in reducing duplicate EKG testing for transferred patients at receiving hospitals. When HIT interoperability is enabled through a common software vendor it yields 15.6% more reduction in the throughput time than when it is enabled through different vendors but it still has no significant effect on duplicate EKG testing. Furthermore we find that HIT interoperability leads to 3.0 percentage points decrease in the 30-day readmission rate of transferred patients which can be explained by the reduction of the throughput time.

Managerial Implications: Our findings demonstrate the value of incentivizing HIT adoption and promoting widespread exchange of health information because HIT interoperability indeed improves the efficiency of healthcare delivery across providers which ultimately translates to improved patient outcomes. Given the lack of reduction in duplicate testing in our study we call for more provider effort toward realizing the full potential of HIT interoperability by minimizing the gap between technology adoption and utilization.