Impact of Health Information Exchange Adoption on Referral Patterns
研究参与健康信息交换网络如何影响医生之间的转诊行为，发现采用HIE会增加参与者之间的转诊量，对医疗政策制定和HIE商业模式创新有参考价值。
Efforts to promote Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) on a nationwide scale are beset with major challenges, and one of them is its meaningful use for both physicians and patients. Referrals potentially provide a context for the meaningful use of HIE, and we are yet to understand how HIEs affect referrals. This research studies the impact of HIE on referral patterns. We establish that participation in an HIE network increases the referrals sent to and received from other HIE participants. We investigate this relationship using both econometric and network-analytic methods. Whereas the econometric analysis focuses on the underlying associations between HIE adoption and referral patterns, the network analysis addresses the transformation process by which HIE adoption and referrals coevolve over time. This study has significant implications for healthcare policy making, development of innovative HIE business models, and management of healthcare organizations. This paper was accepted by Anindya Ghose, information systems. Supplemental Material: Data and the online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4435 .