Organizational Strategies for the Adoption of Electronic Medical Records: Toward an Understanding of Outcome Variation in Nursing Homes

We want to express our sincerest thanks to the many people who have assisted us on this project. We are deeply grateful to the members of the Quality Care Oversight Committee (Martin Scheinman, Jay Sackman, and William Pascocello) and to Mary Jane Koren of the Commonwealth Fund for their support and assistance. We also want to thank Scott White, the coordinator of the New York Nursing Home Demonstration Project, for his close collaboration and insights about nursing homes. We are grateful to Kelly Pike, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell, who has been deeply involved in every aspect of this research. We are also indebted to our Cornell colleagues, Karl Pillemer and Rhoda Meador, to Lorin Hitt at the University of Pennsylvania and to Prasanna Tambe at New York University for their collaboration on the larger research project of which this study is a part and for their warm collegiality. Sincere thanks to Yasamin Miller, Director of Cornell’s Survey Research Institute, and to her dedicated staff. We also thank Stephen Pacicco and the E-health team for their cooperation and assistance. As always, we owe a very great debt to Missy Harrington, who provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper. Lastly, we want to thank the dozens of administrators, supervisors, frontline staff, and union representatives who we interviewed for this study. Without the cooperation of all of these people, this research would not have been possible. Of course, the authors are wholly responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. “[T]he economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system—and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.