Electronic Healthcare's Relationship With Patient Satisfaction and Communication

Healthcare information technology (HIT) has been examined and shown to be a tool to improve patient healthcare quality. This study seeks to define the relationship between HIT applications such as computerized physician order entry, clinical decision support systems, and handheld device use and select Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) measures (doctor and nurse communication, discharge instructions, and whether the patient would highly recommend the hospital). Several control variables were used that represent the hospital level and contextual hospital service area level. The analysis had mixed results: the aforementioned HIT applications may add and support certain HCAHPS measures (Always Given Discharge Information), whereas there were no significant findings for the more interpersonal quality measures (nurse and doctor communication, recommendation). These results show that although patients may not score doctors and nurses significantly higher for their communication in hospitals that use HIT, they did receive discharge instructions significantly at a higher rate than the non-HIT hospitals.