Primary Submission Category: Difference in Differences
Exploring the Impact of Health IT Features on Quality of Hospital Care
Authors: Raluca Cobzaru, Roy Welsch, Stan Finkelstein, Zach Shahn,
Presenting Author: Raluca Cobzaru*
As policies with staggered adoption – such as Medicaid expansion across states – have been gaining traction in the public health sector, so has the topic of difference-in-differences (DiD) methods which allow for time-varying treatment strategies. We utilize a novel adjustment framework for time-dependent covariates in the DiD setting to study the causal effect of implementing certain EHR system features (e.g. clinical decision support, care coordination across departments, automated drug interaction checks, etc.) on hospital performance metrics (e.g. 30-day mortality and readmission rates) over time. Our results help inform Health IT adoption policies and ease the operational burden on hospitals by identifying a sufficient set of EHR features associated with improved quality of care.