Abstract

Becoming more efficient and increasing the quality of healthcare delivery has been a recurring theme in the U.S. for decades. Recently, electronic health records have been touted as a technology-centric path toward healthcare efficiency and quality, with the Federal government incentivizing large-scale adoption of these systems. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the quality differences between teaching and non-teaching hospitals in the post-electronic health record implementation landscape, specifically looking at a possible interaction effect between electronic health records and hospital teaching status. The results of this study showed pneumonia mortality was slightly higher at teaching hospitals, despite the rate being risk-adjusted. The most salient finding of this study was that electronic health records seem to have no effect on mortality in New York State hospitals. There was also no detected interaction effect between electronic health record status and the teaching status of New York State hospitals.