PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Böckerman, Petri
AU  - Laine, Liisa T.
AU  - Nurminen, Mikko
AU  - Saxell, Tanja
TI  - Information Integration, Coordination Failures, and Quality of Prescribing
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.0921-11910R2
DP  - 2022 Dec 07
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 0921-11910R2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/12/01/jhr.0921-11910R2.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/12/01/jhr.0921-11910R2.full
AB  - Poor information flows hamper coordination, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions in health care. We examine the effects of a large-scale policy of health information integration. We use the staggered adoption of a nationwide electronic prescribing system over four years in Finland and prescription-level administrative data. Our results show no discernible effect on the probability of co-prescribing harmful drugs on average, but the heterogeneity analysis reveals that this probability reduces in rural regions, by 35 percent. This substantial reduction is driven by interacting prescriptions from different physicians and generalists. Information integration can therefore improve the coordination of physicians’ interdependent decisions.