The Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde of Health IT: Does Health IT Increase Medical Billing Fraud?

Over the past 10 years, there has been a significant push to adopt electronic measures to help collect, record, and manage personal health information. The benefits of Health IT (HIT) are compelling: reduced administrative costs, fewer errors, and improved patient outcomes. However, widespread adoption of health information systems may also have perverse effects such as facilitating medical billing fraud practices such as cloning and upcoding. Using data collected from multiple data sources of HIT and fraud, and using a panel of state-level hospital discharge data for inpatient and outpatient procedues, we estimate the effect of HIT adoption on medical billing fraud. Preliminary results show a positive relationship between hospital adoption of HIT and increases in medical billing fraud.