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theses

With the push for national EHR adoption and the subsequent increase in meaningful use of HIT applications, the healthcare industry has sought to realize reduced cost, increased safety, and improved patient outcomes. In an effort to evaluate the goal of improved patient outcomes, this study examines the effect of HIT adoption stage on the length of stay (LOS) for children admitted with an asthma diagnosis. Asthma is a chronic disease affecting millions of children each year, and has significant health, monetary, and emotional costs. As asthma is in the top three of most common conditions requiring hospital admissions for children and that nearly 50% of inpatient pediatric patients are covered by Medicaid, improving quality outcomes for this condition has large implications across the healthcare delivery system.
Using comparisons from the KID 2009 and 2012 datasets, the differences between mean LOS for pediatric asthma patients between stages of adoption of Health IT as measured by the EMRAM scale are statistically significant at the p<.05 level, demonstrating that increased use of Health IT has lowered the mean length of stay for this population. Thus, the utilization of a medical best practice, here the adoption of Health IT, resulted in shorter hospital stays and thus cost savings, in this defined pediatric patient population. While further studies examining Health IT implementation in other patient populations are necessary, these results demonstrate that the implementation of Health IT can lead to both better standards of care and lower healthcare costs, which should be of significant interest to those charting the future course of healthcare and healthcare reimbursement in this country.

ETD_9134

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by JoAnn L. Jordan

doi:10.7282/T3GF0Z0H

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.