Book Description
To date, the federal government has paid $35 billion in incentive payments to eligible hospitals who adopt electronic health records (EHRs) and meet certain criteria on EHR implementation and use, as part of what is called the meaningful use program. One such criteria is that hospitals provide patients with the ability to view, download, and transmit information about a hospital admission, also called VDT. Hospitals are penalized if too few patients view, download, or transmit their information after discharge. This study seeks to identify and quantify factors that affect whether or not a patient accesses their health information online by matching county level demographic data with the nation’s 1,423 critical access hospitals and VDT data from the subset of 1,062 CAHs participating in the meaningful use program. A Heckman selection model was run to address CAHs non-random selection into the meaningful use program. Correcting for hospital and county-level variables, I found that both the length of meaningful use program participation and the percent of patients provided the ability to VDT are positively associated (p