The Effect of Communication and EMR Meaningful Use Technologies on Patient Outcomes

We investigate the impact of health information technologies and communication between physicians and nurses on patient outcomes (e.g., mortality, satisfaction, and loyalty). Drawing upon media synchronicity theory, we establish a mediating role of communication between technology enhancement and patient outcomes. We create a unique data set by merging several private and public data sets containing organizational and health IT characteristics in hospitals from 2011 through 2015, and explore the model using several panel regressions with fixed effects. We also calculate indirect and total effects for the communication performance mediation effect. Our findings offer unique contributions to the health IT and communication literature. We show that health information technologies improve communication between physicians and nurses (e.g., medical documentation and health information exchange). Improved communication leads to a reduction in mortality and improves hospital satisfaction and loyalty.