The rise of telemedicine

We have heard much about how COVID-19 has created a paradigm shift in the use of telemedicine. A paper by Patel et al. (2021) uses claims data between January 1, 2020, to June 16, 2020 to measure this trend quantitatively. They find that in a largely commercially-insured population: In the COVID-19 period, 30.1 percent of…

EHR Fatigue

Electronic health records (EHR) are supposed to improve quality. While EHRs certainly are highly useful for information sharing, they may have adverse consequences. One issue may be that EHRs may induce fatigue in physicians and sap their needed energy/concentration away from their primary task: caring for patients. To test whether EHRs increase physician fatigue and…

EHR and physician burnout

Electronic health records (EHR) have the potential to greatly improve the quality of care. EHRs allow multi-specialty teams to access the same underlying medical information and eliminate the issue of miscommunication due to poor physician hand writing. At the same time, EHR increase data entry burden. Is the benefit of EHR worth the cost? One…

Is Uber a substitute for ambulances?

According to a paper by Moskatel and Slutsky (2019), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. In this paper, we ask whether UberX’s entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that…

Death by 1000 clicks: Where EHRs went wrong

An interesting article over at Kaiser Health News on electronic health records (EHRs): But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment…Today, 96 percent of…

Would telehealth increase the price of health care?

Health Affairs December 2018 issue focuses on telehealth.  The general assumption is that telehealth is an unambiguous good.  Getting access to health care providers–particularly those who live in remote areas or have transportation challenges–is certainly a good thing. But could telehealth increase the price of health care? In this thought exercise, pretend for a moment that…