HIEs would lead to $3.1B annual reduction in US spending, study finds

A national effort to implement health information exchanges would cut billions in Medicare spending, according to recent research out of University of Notre Dame (Ind.) and UC San Francisco.

Idris Adjerid, PhD, and Corey Angst, PhD, both IT professors in the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, and Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, a health IT expert at UCSF, authored the study, to be published in the journal Information Systems Research.

For the study, the three researchers compared the average Medicare spending per beneficiary between 2003 and 2009 in healthcare markets with an operational HIE to those without an operational HIE. Their statistical models accounted for differences in healthcare infrastructure, hospital quality, health IT adoption and patient demographic factors.

Read the entire story on the Becker's Hospital Review website.