Sustainable health information exchanges: the role of institutional factors

The transfer of patient information between the domains of community and hospital influences the quality, continuity and cost of health care. To supply the need for information flow between community and hospital, computerized Health Information Exchange (HIE) systems have evolved. This paper examines the institutional forces that shape HIE development in Israel and in the United States. In Israel, the vertically integrated Clalit health services developed a different solution for HIE than was developed in the non-vertically integrated Maccabi and Meuhedet health funds. In the United States the fragmented nature of providers – outside of specific networks such as parts of the Kaiser Permanente and Veterans Administration system – have dictated a very different evolution of information flow between community and hospital. More broadly, we consider how institutional factors shape (and will shape) the development of HIEs in different contexts. This paper applies institutional analysis to explain the emergence of different patterns of development of HIE systems in each of the environments. The institutional analysis in this paper can be used to anticipate the future success or failure of incentives to promote digital information sharing at transition of care.