Paper Summary-Jack Tong

Ayabakan, S., Bardhan, I., Zheng, Z.E. and Kirksey, K., 2017. The impact of health information sharing on duplicate testing. MIS Quarterly, 41(4), pp.1083-1103.

Duplicating tests in healthcare create redundant costs for both patients and the insurance providers and information sharing by integrated healthcare system could reduce duplicating tests. Because the formats and frequency of testing information storage are different between radiology tests (low volume but high cost) and laboratory tests (high volume, low cost, manually processed). The authors postulate that implementation of health information sharing technologies will reduce the duplication rate for duplicating tests, and the reduction is more salient for radiology tests compared to laboratory tests, especially when health information sharing technologies are implemented across disparate provider organizations.

The authors utilize a unique panel dataset consisting of around 40,000 patients visits to the outpatient clinics and hospitals for laboratory and imaging tests related to the diagnosis and treatment of congestive heart failure with a quasi-experimental approach. The results of the paper support the authors’ hypothesis that implementation of information sharing system could reduce the duplicating testing for patients.