SOUTH BEND, Ind., Aug. 18 (UPI) -- Major medical centers that adopt electronic medical records influence neighboring hospitals to speed adoption of computerized record, U.S. researchers say.
Corey M. Angst and Ken Kelley of the University of Notre Dame, Ritu Agarwal of the University of Maryland and V. Sambamurthy of Michigan State University say they used a "social contagion" model to study the diffusion of electronic medical records in U.S. hospitals.
The researchers analyzed 20 years of data from almost 4,000 U.S. hospitals.
The study, published in Management Science, a flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, finds hospitals have mutual influence on each other for information technology adoption.
The researchers say adoption of electronic medical records are accelerated if specific attention is given to increasing adoption among well known, larger, older hospitals in densely populated geographic regions. If these hospitals adopt the computerized medical records, then nearby hospitals vastly increase their rate of adoption.
