Influence of Twitter on Hydroxychloroquine Medication Prescriptions for COVID-19 Patients

Social media is proposed to play a crucial role in healthcare providers\u27 care decisions. However, social media information may not always be reliable as false information is prone to virality, and emotional cues may drive information sharing. Hence, in our study, we strive to understand the influence of social media on healthcare providers\u27 care decisions by empirically examining the influence of Twitter discourse regarding Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) on the actual prescribing rates of the drug in the USA for treating COVID-19 patients. We assembled panel data by collecting tweets from Twitter API v2 and Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions from the Symphony Health dataset on the COVID-19 research database to achieve our research objectives. Econometric analysis of our panel data indicates that Twitter discourse positively influences the proportion of Hydroxychloroquine prescriptions prescribed to COVID-19 patients. Our study has implications for research and practice

THE EFFECT OF HEALTH IT INVESTMENTS ON REGIONAL HEALTH CARE COSTS

This paper analyzes the relationship between health IT investments and regional health care costs. We focus on the regional level effects, which take into account externalities that arise from patient mobility. We find that the relationship between health IT and costs are stronger at a regional level than hospital level, confirming the presence of externality of health IT investments. This finding has important implications: it suggests that hospital level analysis underestimates the benefits of health IT investments and can lead to suboptimal investment decision from the society´s point of view. We also find that cost reduction impacts of health IT investment are higher over the long term. We present evidence that advanced IT applications that enable within hospital communication are more beneficial in more urban areas. Higher software integration among the adopting hospitals further decreases the health care costs in the area by enabling electronic medical record sharing. In addition, we show that not all hospitals have to make same level of IT investment to obtain optimal reductions in health care costs. Instead, having some leading hospitals in health IT investments can be more beneficial

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

Achieving continuous professional development in higher education

Traditional higher education technology emphasizes knowledge transmission. In contrast, the Community platform presented in this paper follows a social approach that interleaves knowledge delivery with social and professional skills development, engaging with others, and personal growth. In this paper, we apply learning and complex adaptive systems theory to motivate and justify a continuous professional development model that improves higher education outcomes such as placement. The paper follows action design research (ADR) as the research method to propose and evaluate design principles

The Impact of Online Platforms on Labor Markets

Online platforms have been argued to lower search costs thus making them useful for employers to find employees and vice-versa. While a body of research has examined the effect of platforms on number of metrics, the effect that they will have on local labor market metrics (such as effects on employment and wages) is not known. In this paper, we examine the effect of the staggered introduction of Craigslist across different Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US. We provide evidence that rather than the platform increasing competition to the local workforce, the introduction of the platform raised both employment and wages for tradable jobs (defined as jobs that can be outsourced and performed from other locations) in the region

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

This paper extends research that has shown the effect of IT on productivity of nations. 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 GDP to assess how satisfied people are with their lives. Additionally, due to the effects ICT can have that are not directly related to productivity, investments in IT should have an impact on the well-being of the country independent of the productivity of the nation. In this paper, we use a proprietary database and show that government emphasis on ICT increases the use ICT services in a country, which leads to an increase in the levels of well-being among citizens in that country

The Spillover Effects of Health IT Investments on Regional Health Care Costs

In this paper, we examine the effect of the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems to neighboring hospitals. We find that although EMR systems increases the operational costs for adopting hospitals, it has significant spillover effects by reducing the health care costs of the other hospitals in the same region (possibly due to patient mobility and better care that is provided by these systems). These regional externalities are stronger especially in the long term. Our results provide support to the role of EMR investments in reducing overall health care costs. Estimates, based on our results, suggest that EMR investments can lead to net reduction in national health care cost by about $47 billion dollars over 4 years

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