Professor Monideepa Tarafdar, along with Dr David Dobrzykowski of Bowling Green State University, USA, has received a prestigious award for their paper on electronic health record systems use, healthcare process coordination, and physician performance.

The pair received the Best Paper Award from the Decision Sciences Journal, one of the leading journals in the field of Operations Management/Information Systems. The award, which forms part of the 2017 Decision Sciences Institute Awards, was presented at the Annual Decision Sciences Institute Meeting in Washington DC.

The accolade is awarded annually to the authors of the paper judged to be the best published in the Decision Sciences Journal published in the previous year. Monideepa and David received the award for their paper entitled “Linking Electronic Medical Records use to Physicians’ Performance: A contextual analysis”.

This paper examines three factors important to leveraging electronic health record systems - 1) interdependence in healthcare delivery processes, 2) physician autonomy, and 3) the trend of hospital employment of physicians. It draws on theoretical perspectives in coordination, shared values, and agency to explain how the use of electronic health record systems can improve physicians’ performance. The paper is based on 583 data points from 302 hospitals in 47 states in the USA. Results show that information sharing and shared values among healthcare delivery professionals fully mediate the relationship between electronic health record systems use and physicians’ performance. Overall the study shows that EMR use should be complemented by three types of coordination mechanisms - processual (information sharing), social (shared values) and structural (physician employment) - to yield positive effects on physicians’ performance.

Professor Monideepa Tarafdar said: “Proper use of electronic health record systems will form the basis of hospitals’ turn towards leveraging data to improve healthcare delivery. Coordination mechanisms in healthcare delivery processes, in the context of electronic health care systems, is an exciting and emerging area and we are delighted to be among the early researchers in this domain. This domain is well poised to contribute to the healthcare research programme in LUMS, and the University’s Health Innovation Campus.”