What do electronic medical records have to do with declining COVID mortality rates at hospitals?

Indranil Bardhan, Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Health Care Management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, answers this.

Faculty Bio:

Indranil Bardhan is the Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Health Care Management in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor of management information systems and teaches courses in the MBA program as well as the M.S. program.Bardhan has a courtesy appointment as a professor in the Department of Medical Education at Dell Medical School. His research focuses on health care analytics and digital health innovation, and involves close collaboration with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Dell Med. His studies have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the UT Health system.Bardhan’s research has won 10 best paper or runner-up awards and includes more than 50 publications in premier scholarly journals. He has also served as senior editor of several prestigious journals.Bardhan holds a Ph.D. in management science and information systems from Texas McCombs. He was inducted as a distinguished fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society in 2019.

Transcript:

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a little-known success story in U.S. hospitals. Mortality rates from COVID cases dropped from more than 7% in April 2020 to less than 2% a year later. What explains this decline? Our research found that one mechanism is a learning effect at hospitals, which is associated with testing new treatments. Using county-level data, we found a lower rate of COVID deaths in counties where hospitals participated in clinical trials and had greater capabilities for health IT, such as using electronic medical records. Not only did counties whose hospitals had greater IT capabilities do better at treating patients several months into the pandemic, but they also learned faster. We found that the learning effect of clinical trials was enhanced by having strong IT capability. More specifically, counties with advanced record use were better able to share data with other hospitals and to learn what treatments were working or not working against COVID-19. That sharing made a life-and-death difference.• Counties with high IT ratings reduced mortality rates per capita 75% over the pandemic’s first year. That’s compared to 47% for low-rated counties.• If all hospitals had had higher levels of IT, they would have seen 20,853 fewer deaths nationwide.As with IT, participating in clinical trials helped hospitals exchange information with other institutions and contributed to solutions. We hope that our research can help policymakers and decision makers understand the value of IT a little bit better. Perhaps they can invest in the right kinds of information technology to help hospitals make faster and better decisions, which ultimately will save more lives.

Read More:

[Nature] - Learning from COVID-19: clinical trials, health information technology, and patient mortality

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Indranil Bardhan, University of Texas at Austin - A Positive Lesson From COVID-19 Clinical Trials and IT Capabilities Decreased Death Rates in Hospitals

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Indranil Bardhan, University of Texas at Austin - A Positive Lesson From COVID-19 Clinical Trials and IT Capabilities Decreased Death Rates in Hospitals