Information Integration, Coordination Failures, and Quality of Prescribing

Abstract

Poor information flows hamper coordination, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions in health care. We examine the effects of a large-scale policy of health information integration. We use the staggered adoption of a nationwide electronic prescribing system over four years in Finland and prescription-level administrative data. Our results show no discernible effect on the probability of co-prescribing harmful drugs on average, but the heterogeneity analysis reveals that this probability reduces in rural regions, by 35 percent. This substantial reduction is driven by interacting prescriptions from different physicians and generalists. Information integration can therefore improve the coordination of physicians' interdependent decisions.

Information integration, procurement internal controls, material and purchasing procedure standardization and procurement performance in humanitarian organizations

“…We operationalize information integration in terms of information sharing and collaborative planning (Cai et al, 2010), while procurement performance is measured in terms of cost, quality and delivery time . According to prior scholars (Cai et al, 2010;Wong et al, 2011;Lotfi et al, 2013;Shibin et al, 2017;Maghsoudi et al, 2018;Singhry and Abd Rahman, 2018;Yu et al, 2018;Böckerman et al, 2020;Madzimure et al, 2020), information integration plays an essential role in managing and coordinating cross-firm activities such as procurement. Kim et al (2005) indicate that information integration does not necessarily bring desirable results such as cost reduction and efficiency improvement.…”