Hospital Switching and Duplicate Tests: Can Health Information Exchange Reduce Redundant Testing?
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent healthcare reform has pointed out the excessive amount of redundancies and waste in US healthcare spending, in which duplicate testing is one contributing factor. In this research, we investigate the sources of waste in terms of duplication of radiology imaging tests when information sharing across providers are fragmented and patients may switch from one hospital to another throughout their treatment processes. We hypothesize that switching hospitals will result in increased duplicate procedures due to lack of visibility into patient medical history. In our econometric approach, we utilize a comprehensive dataset of 39,600+ Congestive Heart Failure patient visits across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals in North Texas from 2005 to 2012. We simultaneously estimate the hospital switching and duplicate testing models using two-step maximum likelihood estimation. Our results suggest that hospital switching is significantly associated with greater levels of test duplication. We also show that the rate of duplication of patients with private insurance is higher than that of Medicare patients. Our results support the need to implement health information exchanges to share patient medical data across hospitals as one avenue to reduce the incidence of test duplication and the overall cost of healthcare.
منابع مشابه
Value of Health Information Sharing in Reducing Healthcare Waste: An analysis of duplicate testing across hospitals
Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the US healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplication of radiology tests when information sharing across healthcare providers is fragmented, and patients switch from one hospital to another. We hypothesize that patients’ switching behavior across hosp...
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