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Quang “Neo” Bui ( qnbui@saunders.rit.edu) is an assistant
professor of management information systems in the
Saunders College of Business of the Rochester Institute
of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA.
Sean Hansen ( shansen@saunders.rit.edu) is an associate
professor of management information systems in the
Saunders College of Business of the Rochester Institute
of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA.
Manlu Liu ( manluliu@saunders.rit.edu) is an associate
professor of management information systems and
accounting in the Saunders College of Business of the
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA.
Qiang (John) Tu ( jtu@saunders.rit.edu) is a professor
of management information systems and the Senior
Associate Dean in the Saunders College of Business of the
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA.
© 2018 ACM 0001-0782/18/10 $15.00
fective, enhanced, or idiosyncratic
use of IT resources. 2, 8 Insight from
the research could inform the aforementioned efforts among healthcare
system participants to identify and
disseminate best practices and foster
more productive use patterns.
Efforts by policymakers. Policymakers play a significant role in each of
the measures we have proposed, as in
community building through RHIOs
and advancing outcome-oriented measures of HIT use. While they should
work with academic researchers and
the industry to identify more relevant
metrics for healthcare providers, it
is equally important they maintain a
holistic view of the healthcare value
chain. Instead of focusing on policies
that incentivize only EHR adoption
or HIE participation, policymakers
should also consider how to promote
experimentation both within and
across geographic boundaries. This
might include more flexible use-style
incentive programs that reward not
only hospital-by-hospital efforts but
also cross-hospital, cross-state, and
cross-boundary initiatives. It is difficult today to promote technologies
that provide value across geographical locations (such as telemedicine) or
across institutional boundaries (such
as healthcare supply-chain systems).
In order to promote innovation and
collaboration, policymakers might
thus want to consider measures that
target multiple parties in a healthcare value chain rather than a limited
number of dominant players. This
would include support for public-pri-vate partnerships that bring together
healthcare providers, payer organizations, and HIT providers or initiatives
that include large-scale participation
groups (such as the Precision Medicine Initiative). Such efforts could leverage emergent technologies (such
as big data analytics platforms, mobile health apps, and social media) to
quickly assess the efficacy of a diverse
set of HIT projects and channel resources toward the ones that show the
greatest promise for bridging the gap
between HIT use and health outcomes
across populations.
Conclusion
IT use in the healthcare industry has
experienced tremendous growth and
attention since 2007. Yet concrete
and credible evidence that HIT im-
proves health outcomes remains in-
conclusive. Our investigation of New
York State healthcare providers fur-
ther indicates the healthcare industry
may be experiencing an ongoing HIT
productivity paradox, mirroring earli-
er patterns in manufacturing and oth-
er industrial sectors. While potential
HIT contribution to health outcomes
remains an open question, we suggest
a collective approach is needed to ad-
dress the many issues raised by the
HIT productivity paradox and hope
our research invites further inquiry
into this important issue.
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