Can Health Care Information Technology Save Babies?
ResearchPosted on rand.org Apr 1, 2011Published In: The Journal of Political Economy, v. 119, no. 2, Apr. 2011, p. 289-324
Electronic medical records (EMRs) facilitate fast and accurate access to patient records, which could improve diagnosis and patient monitoring. Using a 12-year county-level panel, we find that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with EMRs reduces neonatal mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is driven by a reduction of deaths from conditions requiring careful monitoring. We also find a strong decrease in mortality when we instrument for EMR adoption using variation in state medical privacy laws. Rough cost effectiveness calculations suggest that EMRs are associated with a cost of $531,000 per baby's life saved.
Topics
Document Details
- Copyright: University of Chicago
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- Availability: Non-RAND
- Year: 2011
- Pages: 36
- Document Number: EP-201100-103
This publication is part of the RAND external publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.