Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Better Inpatient Health Quality At Lower Cost: Should I Participate In The Online Healthcare Community First?, Kai Luo, Qiu-Hong Wang, Hock Hai Teo, Xi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As policy makers across the globe look to health information technology (HIT) as a meansof improving the efficiency of the healthcare systems, it has sparked significant interestin understanding how HIT might help achieve that. While researchers have examined anddocumented the efficiency-improving effect of various institution HITs (e.g., electronicclinic pathways and telemedicine), the impacts of consumer HITs such as onlinehealthcare communities have been generally overlooked. Utilizing two unique datasetsfrom both an online healthcare community and a general hospital, we study the impactof online healthcare community on offline inpatient care efficiency. Through rigorousanalysis, we find that communications between physicians and patients on …