Medical Record Adoption In Hospitals Sped By Key Medical Centers, Says Management Insights Study

Persuading influential medical centers to adopt electronic medical records helps speed adoption by their neighboring hospitals, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, a flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).



"Social Contagion and Information Technology Diffusion: The Adoption of Electronic Medical Records in U.S. Hospitals" is by Corey M. Angst and Ken Kelley of the University of Notre Dame; Ritu Agarwal of the University of Maryland; and V. Sambamurthy of Michigan State University.



Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the monthly journal.



The call for electronic medical records extends back to the Clinton and Bush administrations. In a State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush called for broad adoption of electronic medical records by the middle of this decade. Last year, President Barack Obama signed into law HR 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocates $19.2 billion in funding to support the adoption and use of health information technology to reduce clerical errors and costs in health care.



The authors of this study asked what mechanisms influence the swift and successful diffusion of technological innovations at hospitals. They use a "social contagion" model to study the diffusion of electronic medical records in the population of U.S. hospitals; hospitals have mutual influence on each other for information technology adoption.



The authors look at 20 years of data from almost 4,000 U.S. hospitals and write that diffusion is accelerated if specific attention is given to increasing adoption among well-known, larger, older hospitals in densely populated geographic regions. Their insight for management is that targeting specific influential institutions for a new technology can vastly increase its rate of adoption.



The other Insights in the current issue are:
The Lean and Hungry or Fat and Content? Entrepreneurs' Wealth and Start-Up Performance by Hans K. Hvide, Jarle Moen
Strategic Entry Before Demand Takes Off by Qiaowei Shen, J. Miguel Villas-Boas
Optimal Choice and Beliefs with Ex Ante Savoring and Ex Post Disappointment by Christian Gollier, Alexander Muermann
Optimal Flexibility Configurations in Newsvendor Networks: Going Beyond Chaining and Pairing by Achal Bassamboo, Ramandeep S. Randhawa, Jan A. Van Mieghem
Model of Migration and Use of Platforms: Role of Hierarchy, Current Generation, and Complementarities in Consumer Settings by Xin Xu, Viswanath Venkatesh, Kar Yan Tam, Se-Joon Hong
Incentives in New Product Development Projects and the Role of Target Costing by Jurgen Mihm
Joint Dynamic Pricing of Multiple Perishable Products Under Consumer Choice by YalcД±n Akcay, Harihara Prasad Natarajan, Susan H. Xu
Optimal Control and Equilibrium Behavior of Production-Inventory Systems by Owen Q. Wu, Hong Chen
Improving Supply Chain Performance and Managing Risk Under Weather-Related Demand Uncertainty by Frank Youhua Chen, Candace Arai Yano
Management Economics in a Large Retail Company by W. Stanley Siebert, Nikolay Zubanov

Source:

Barry List

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences

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