The Impact of Health Information Sharing on Duplicate Testing

Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the U.S. healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplicate tests when patients utilize healthcare services from multiple providers, and yet information sharing...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:MIS quarterly 2017-12, Vol.41 (4), p.1083-1104
Main Authors: Ayabakan, Sezgin, Bardhan, Indranil, Zheng, Zhiqiang (Eric), Kirksey, Kirk
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Health care
Health care policy
Hospitals
Information sharing
Laboratories
Laboratory tests
Medical tests
Organizations
Radiology
Reproduction (copying)
Studies
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the U.S. healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplicate tests when patients utilize healthcare services from multiple providers, and yet information sharing across these providers is fragmented. We hypothesize that implementation of health information sharing technologies will reduce the duplication rate more for radiology tests compared to laboratory tests, especially when health information sharing technologies are implemented across disparate provider organizations. We utilize a unique panel data set consisting of 39,600 patient visits from 2005 to 2012, across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals, to test our hypotheses. We apply a quasi-experimental approach to investigate the impact of health information sharing technologies on the duplicate testing rate. Our results indicate that usage of information sharing technologies across health organizations is associated with lower duplication rates, and the extent of reduction in duplicate tests is more pronounced among radiology tests compared to laboratory tests. Our results support the need for implementation of health information exchanges as a potential solution to reduce the incidence of duplicate tests.
ISSN:0276-7783
2162-9730
DOI:10.25300/MISQ/2017/41.4.04