The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

The Trillion Dollar Conundrum: Complementarities and Health Information Technology

We examine the heterogeneous relationship between the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) and hospital operating costs at thousands of U.S. hospitals between 1996 and 2009. Combining data from multiple sources, we first identify a puzzle that has been seen in prior studies: Adoption of EMR is generally associated with a slight increase in costs. We draw on the literature on information...

Information technology: the trillion-dollar opportunity

Health Affairs A Trillion - Dollar Geography Lesson

Dartmouth researchers have demonstrated that there is tremendous geographic variation in the efficiency of health care delivery systems, fostered by perverse incentives that penalize integration, reward fragmentation, and encourage the use of technologies in the “gray areas” of medicine. This research suggests that it is possible to deliver higher-quality care at lower cost. We argue that integ...

The impact of information technology on health

Information Technology (IT) is the study of systems especially computers for storing, retrieving, and sending information. It uses any networking and other physical devices, infrastructures to secure and exchange all forms of electronic data. IT is used globally as a major portion of daily life and we use it nearly every day within organizations for many reasons. Our computers, mobile phones an...

Testing Three-Way Complementarities: Performance Pay, Monitoring and Information Technology

We find evidence of three-way complementarities among information technology (IT), performance pay, and monitoring practices. We develop a principal-agent model examining how these practices work together as an incentive system that produces the largest productivity premium when the practices are implemented in concert. We assess our model by combining finegrained data on Human Capital Manageme...