TY - JOUR
T1 - Hospital implementation of health information technology and quality of care
T2 - Are they related?
AU - Restuccia, Joseph D.
AU - Cohen, Alan B.
AU - Horwitt, Jedediah N.
AU - Shwartz, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund. We are indebted to Anthony Shih and Anne-Marie Audet of the Fund for their advice, support, and constructive suggestions throughout the design and conduct of the study. We thank our colleagues – Raymond Kang, Peter Kralovec, Sally Holmes, Frances Margolin, and Deborah Bohr – for their valuable contributions to the development of the QAS, the CPS, and the database on which the analytic findings reported here were based. We also thank 3 M™ Health Information Systems’ for use of its All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Groups (APR-DRGs) software. We especially wish to thank Jennifer Drake for her contributions not only to survey development, but also to earlier analysis of survey findings relevant to this paper.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Background: Recently, there has been considerable effort to promote the use of health information technology (HIT) in order to improve health care quality. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which HIT implementation is associated with hospital patient care quality. We undertook this study to determine the association of various HITs with: hospital quality improvement (QI) practices and strategies; adherence to process of care measures; risk-adjusted inpatient mortality; patient satisfaction; and assessment of patient care quality by hospital quality managers and front-line clinicians. Methods. We conducted surveys of quality managers and front-line clinicians (physicians and nurses) in 470 short-term, general hospitals to obtain data on hospitals' extent of HIT implementation, QI practices and strategies, assessments of quality performance, commitment to quality, and sufficiency of resources for QI. Of the 470 hospitals, 401 submitted complete data necessary for analysis. We also developed measures of hospital performance from several publicly data available sources: Hospital Compare adherence to process of care measures; Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) file; and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems HCAHPS® survey. We used Poisson regression analysis to examine the association between HIT implementation and QI practices and strategies, and general linear models to examine the relationship between HIT implementation and hospital performance measures. Results: Controlling for potential confounders, we found that hospitals with high levels of HIT implementation engaged in a statistically significant greater number of QI practices and strategies, and had significantly better performance on mortality rates, patient satisfaction measures, and assessments of patient care quality by hospital quality managers; there was weaker evidence of higher assessments of patient care quality by front-line clinicians. Conclusions: Hospital implementation of HIT was positively associated with activities intended to improve patient care quality and with higher performance on four of six performance measures.
AB - Background: Recently, there has been considerable effort to promote the use of health information technology (HIT) in order to improve health care quality. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which HIT implementation is associated with hospital patient care quality. We undertook this study to determine the association of various HITs with: hospital quality improvement (QI) practices and strategies; adherence to process of care measures; risk-adjusted inpatient mortality; patient satisfaction; and assessment of patient care quality by hospital quality managers and front-line clinicians. Methods. We conducted surveys of quality managers and front-line clinicians (physicians and nurses) in 470 short-term, general hospitals to obtain data on hospitals' extent of HIT implementation, QI practices and strategies, assessments of quality performance, commitment to quality, and sufficiency of resources for QI. Of the 470 hospitals, 401 submitted complete data necessary for analysis. We also developed measures of hospital performance from several publicly data available sources: Hospital Compare adherence to process of care measures; Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) file; and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems HCAHPS® survey. We used Poisson regression analysis to examine the association between HIT implementation and QI practices and strategies, and general linear models to examine the relationship between HIT implementation and hospital performance measures. Results: Controlling for potential confounders, we found that hospitals with high levels of HIT implementation engaged in a statistically significant greater number of QI practices and strategies, and had significantly better performance on mortality rates, patient satisfaction measures, and assessments of patient care quality by hospital quality managers; there was weaker evidence of higher assessments of patient care quality by front-line clinicians. Conclusions: Hospital implementation of HIT was positively associated with activities intended to improve patient care quality and with higher performance on four of six performance measures.
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U2 - 10.1186/1472-6947-12-109
DO - 10.1186/1472-6947-12-109
M3 - Review article
C2 - 23016699
AN - SCOPUS:84866662028
VL - 12
JO - BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
JF - BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
SN - 1472-6947
IS - 1
M1 - 109
ER -