Digital Waste? Unintended Consequences of Health Information Technology

Impact of a physician-targeted letter on opioid prescribing

“…The prescription is identified based on patient identifier, prescription date, prescriber identifier, ATC code, strength of the drug and drug administration route. Similar aggregation has been used in Böckerman et al (2019). Our results are robust to this aggregation, which suggests that not necessarily filling out the whole prescription is only a small disadvantage to our study.…”

Information Integration, Coordination Failures, and Quality of Prescribing

“…Similarly, by integrating prescription information across pharmacies, the system can reduce the purchasing of harmful combinations of drugs from multiple pharmacies. Böckerman et al (2019) focus on another important objective of e-prescribing: improvements in the efficiency of the prescribing process through digital generation and transfer of a patient's prescriptions between physicians and pharmacies. Compared to traditional paper prescriptions, eprescribing reduces the hassle and time costs of renewing and filling prescriptions, also eliminating lost prescriptions.…”

“…We also contribute to the literature analyzing how information technology affects patient health (for example, McCullough et al 2010;Miller and Tucker 2011;Agha 2014;McCullough, Parente, and Town 2016;Böckerman et al 2019). Our paper is most closely related to work by McCullough, Parente, and Town (2016), who examine health effects at the hospital level for patients whose diagnoses require cross-specialty coordination.…”