Title: Healthcare outcomes, information technology, and Medicare reimbursements: a hospital-level analyses

Authors: Danish H. Saifee; Indranil R. Bardhan

Addresses: Naveen Jindal School of Management, SM 33, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA ' Naveen Jindal School of Management, SM 33, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA

Abstract: The interplay between healthcare service quality, health IT, and variation in reimbursements for healthcare services is an understudied phenomenon. We propose a unified framework to empirically examine the association between healthcare quality, health IT usage and Medicare reimbursements for congestive heart failure cases. Hospital-level data from multiple sources, including Medicare, CMS hospital compare, and HIMSS Analytics, were obtained and integrated for the analyses reported in this study. Our empirical analyses, based on a three-year panel dataset of CHF patients, indicates a negative association between hospital mortality rates and average Medicare reimbursements, and a positive association between readmission rates and Medicare payments. We report a weak positive association between the usage of health IT systems and magnitude of average Medicare payments, suggesting that hospitals with greater usage of health IT exhibit higher Medicare reimbursements.

Keywords: mortality rates; hospital readmissions; health IT usage; Medicare payments; congestive heart failure; healthcare outcomes; information technology; hospitals; healthcare services; service quality; Medicare reimbursements.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2017.083161

International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 2017 Vol.9 No.2/3, pp.129 - 156

Received: 14 Jul 2016
Accepted: 27 Nov 2016
Published online: 21 Mar 2017 *

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