Can Health Care Information Technology Save Babies?
Name
Tucker_Can Healthcare.pdf
Size
462.96 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
33bf9f93ef5cf183730d6a582bac6432
Author(s)
Miller, Amalia R.
Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth
Date Issued
April 2011
Journal
Journal of Political Economy
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
Miller, Amalia R., and Catherine E. Tucker. “Can Health Care Information Technology Save Babies?” The Journal of Political Economy 119.2 (2011) : 289-324.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1086/660083
