Does the Adoption of EMR Systems Inflate Medicare Reimbursements?

The adoption of EMR systems has been argued to lead to physicians “upcoding” their patients to inflate insurance reimbursements. In this paper, we examine if the adoption of the Clinical Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system is associated with an increase in the complexity of the patients\u27 case mix that hospitals report (termed upcoding ). We make use of a staggered roll-out of the Recovery Audit Program to combat upcoding as a natural experiment to assess the impact of the adoption of the CPOE systems on the case mix that a hospital reports. We find that on average the adoption of CPOE systems is associated with an increase in the reported case mix of hospitals, and that the Audit program has had an effect on reducing the case mix that hospitals report to Medicare for reimbursement. Implications for preventing inflated reimbursements due to upcoding are discussed

Does Information and Communication Technology Lead to the Well-Being of Nations? A Country-Level Empirical Investigation

This paper examines the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in enhancing the well-being of nations. Extending research on the role of ICT in the productivity of nations, we posit that the effects of ICT may not be limited to productivity (e.g., GDP), and we argue that the use of ICT can also improve the well-being of a country by helping citizens to develop their social capital and achieve social equality, enabling access to health-related information and health services, providing education to disadvantaged communities, and facilitating commerce. Using a number of empirical specifications, specifically a fixed-effects model and an instrumental variable approach, our results show that the level of ICT use (number of fixed telephones, Internet, mobile phones) in a country predict a country’s well-being (despite accounting for GDP and several other control variables that also predict a country’s well-being). Furthermore, by using an exploratory method (biclustering) of identifying both country-specific and ICT-specific variables simultaneously, we identify clusters of countries with similar patterns in terms of their use of ICT, and we show that not all countries increase their level of well-being by using ICT in the same manner. Interestingly, we find that less developed countries increase their level of well-being with mobile phones primarily, while more developed countries increase their level of well-being with any ICT system. Contributions and implications for enhancing the well-being of nations with ICT are discussed

ICIS - Does the Adoption of EMR Systems Inflate Medicare Reimbursements

The adoption of EMR systems has been argued to lead to physicians “upcoding” their patients to inflate insurance reimbursements. In this paper, we examine if the adoption of the Clinical Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system is associated with an increase in the complexity of the patients' case mix that hospitals report (termed "upcoding"). We make use of a staggered roll-out of the Recovery Audit Program to combat upcoding as a natural experiment to assess the impact of the adoption of the CPOE systems on the case mix that a hospital reports. We find that on average the adoption of CPOE systems is associated with an increase in the reported case mix of hospitals, and that the Audit program has had an effect on reducing the case mix that hospitals report to Medicare for reimbursement. Implications for preventing inflated reimbursements due to "upcoding" are discussed

Do Electronic Health Record Systems Increase Medicare Reimbursements? The Moderating Effect of the Recovery Audit Program

Electronic health record (EHR) systems allow physicians to automate the process of entering patient data relative to manual entry in traditional paper-based records. However, such automated data en..

ICIS - Can Information and Communication Technology lead to Well-Being? An Empirical Analysis

In this paper, we examine the effect that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can have on the well being of nations. This is important for two reasons. First, in the economics literature, a number of studies have focused on well-being rather than measures of Gross Development Product (GDP) as a measure of how satisfied people are with their lives. Additionally, due to effects that IT and communication can have and that are not directly related to productivity, investments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should have an impact on the well-being of the country independent of the productivity of the nation. We show that a push by governments to encourage the uptake of ICT within an economy can lead to an increase of the ease with which ICT services can be adopted which can further lead to an increase in the well-being for the citizens of a country

Does information and communication technology lead to the well-being of nations? a country-level empirical investigation

This paper examines the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in enhancing the well-being of nations. Extending research on the role of ICT in the productivity of nations, we posit that the effects of ICT may not be limited to productivity (e.g., GDP), and we argue that the use of ICT can also improve the well-being of a country by helping citizens to develop their social capital and achieve social equality, enabling access to health-related information and health services, providing education to disadvantaged communities, and facilitating commerce. Using a number of empirical specifications, specifically a fixed-effects model and an instrumental variable approach, our results show that the level of ICT use (number of fixed telephones, Internet, mobile phones) in a country predict a country's well-being (despite accounting for GDP and several other control variables that also predict a country's well-being). Furthermore, by using an exploratory method (biclustering) of identifying both country-specific and ICT-specific variables simultaneously, we identify clusters of countries with similar patterns in terms of their use of ICT, and we show that not all countries increase their level of well-being by using ICT in the same manner. Interestingly, we find that less developed countries increase their level of well-being with mobile phones primarily, while more developed countries increase their level of well-being with any ICT system. Contributions and implications for enhancing the well-being of nations with ICT are discussed

ICIS - Antecedents of Health IT Roll Back

The adoption of Health IT has been argued to bring about improvements in adopting hospitals. However, examining a panel of hospitals for the adoption of IT, we find that close to 50% of hospitals that adopt a health IT system go on to stop using it during the duration of our panel. 1 We find that smaller hospitals and hospitals that are located in areas that have low IT-Intensity are more likely to roll-back IT systems. Additionally, we find that advanced IT systems (that are more complex to implement) are more likely to be rolled back in the absence of complementary services and in smaller organizations. Additionally, we discuss further research that we hope to undertake where we examine the effect of other factors on the probability of roll-back. We hope that reducing this roll-back can reduce the unnecessary costs that hospitals may have to incur as they implement IT systems