Electronic medical records and medical procedure choice: Evidence from cesarean sections
研究医院采用电子病历如何影响剖宫产选择，发现高级电子病历系统（含决策支持）使低风险产妇剖宫产率降低2.5%，但仅对原本剖宫产率较低的医院有效。
This paper examines how hospital adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) impacts medical procedure choice in the context of cesarean section deliveries. It provides a unique contribution by tying the literature on EMR diffusion to the literature on the utilization of expensive medical technology and provider practice style. Exploiting within-hospital variation in three types of EMR adoption, we find that computerized physician order entry, an advanced EMR system that typically incorporates decision support, reduces C-section rates for low-risk mothers by 2.5%. Obstetric-specific EMR systems and physician documentation have no statistically significant effect on C-section rates. In addition, we find that the computerized practitioner order entry effect occurs predominantly in hospitals that were already performing fewer C-sections and does not change the behavior of already high-intensity providers.