Factors Affecting Health Information Technology Expenditure in California Hospitals
This paper investigates the factors affecting health information technology (IT) investment. Different from previous studies, health IT was measured as the dollar amount of hardware, software and labor related health IT. This study employed Hospital and Patient level data of the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) from 2000 to 2006. The generalized linear model (GLM) was employed with log link and normal distribution and controlled for clustering error. This study found that not-for-profit and government hospital, teaching hospitals, competition, health IT expenditure of neighborhood hospitals were positively associated with health IT expenditure. However, rural hospitals were negatively associated with health IT expenditure. Moreover, this study found a significant increase in health IT investment over seven years resulted from increased clinical IT adoption.