Saving Patient Ryan-Can Advanced Electronic Medical Records Make Patient Care Safer?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hydari, Muhammad Zia; Telang, Rahul; Marella, William M.
• 署名单位: Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh; Carnegie Mellon University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3042
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 2041-2059
• 关键词: information systems; Healthcare; IT policy and management; economics of IS; patient safety; electronic medical records (EMR); medication errors

摘要

The risk of patient harm resulting from medical care affects hundreds of thousands of patients and costs tens of billions of dollars every year. Advanced electronic medical records (EMRs) are expected to improve patient safety, but the evidence of their impact on patient safety is inconclusive. A key challenge to evaluating advanced EMRs' impact has been the lack of reliable patient safety data. We address this issue by analyzing a new patient safety data set from the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority (PSA), a state agency that aggregates patient safety data from Pennsylvania hospitals. Using a 2005-2014 panel from PSA, we identify advanced EMRs' effect using the difference-indifferences method. We find that advanced EMRs lead to a 17.5% decline in patient safety events, driven by reductions in medication errors, falls, and complication errors. Further, our analysis shows a decline in medium- and high-severity events.