Healthcare outcomes, information technology, and Medicare reimbursements: a hospital-level analyses

Abstract

The interplay between healthcare service quality, health IT, and variation in reimbursements for healthcare services is an understudied phenomenon. We propose a unified framework to empirically examine the association between healthcare quality, health IT usage and Medicare reimbursements for congestive heart failure cases. Hospital-level data from multiple sources, including Medicare, CMS hospital compare, and HIMSS Analytics, were obtained and integrated for the analyses reported in this study. Our empirical analyses, based on a three-year panel dataset of CHF patients, indicates a negative association between hospital mortality rates and average Medicare reimbursements, and a positive association between readmission rates and Medicare payments. We report a weak positive association between the usage of health IT systems and magnitude of average Medicare payments, suggesting that hospitals with greater usage of health IT exhibit higher Medicare reimbursements.