Location

260-055, Owen G. Glenn Building

Start Date

12-15-2014

Description

Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the US healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplication of radiology tests when information sharing across healthcare providers is fragmented, and patients switch from one hospital to another. We hypothesize that patients’ switching behavior across hospitals is associated with a higher levels of duplicate testing, and argue that implementation of intra- and inter-hospital information sharing technologies will help to reduce duplicate tests. We utilize a panel data set consisting of 39,600 patient visits across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals from 2005 to 2012. Our results indicate that hospital switching is associated with greater duplicate testing and usage of inter-hospital information systems is associated with lower duplication. Our results support the need for implementation of health information exchanges as a potential solution to reduce the incidence of duplicate tests.

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Dec 15th, 12:00 AM

Value of Health Information Sharing in Reducing Healthcare Waste: An analysis of duplicate testing across hospitals

260-055, Owen G. Glenn Building

Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the US healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplication of radiology tests when information sharing across healthcare providers is fragmented, and patients switch from one hospital to another. We hypothesize that patients’ switching behavior across hospitals is associated with a higher levels of duplicate testing, and argue that implementation of intra- and inter-hospital information sharing technologies will help to reduce duplicate tests. We utilize a panel data set consisting of 39,600 patient visits across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals from 2005 to 2012. Our results indicate that hospital switching is associated with greater duplicate testing and usage of inter-hospital information systems is associated with lower duplication. Our results support the need for implementation of health information exchanges as a potential solution to reduce the incidence of duplicate tests.