Question

1. Identify and select any topic of your interest related to public health or health informatics, for approval

2. List down your study question, study goal, and study specific objectives, for approval

3. Why you have selected this topic and why it is important? what are its scopes in health

4. Give a brief introduction of your research topic along with its key terms

Please attach the cover sheet to you your assignment 

Examples of previous students work,

1. Privatization of hemodialysis centers improves health care for kidney patients: insight from ministry of health in Saudi Arabia

2. Uses of smokeless tobacco and associated health effects among adults in southern region of Saudi Arabia: cross sectional study. 

subject must be from Saudia Arabia

Answer 1

Technology adoption and Health care Management

Research in this area seeks to understand the factors that affect technology adoption. Here the focus is mainly on health care organizations and the users, mostly health care professionals, of new health information technologies. The research draws from different fields such as communication science and management to understand factors that impede technology adoption in the health care industry.

Recent decades have witnessed an increasing share of the level of spending on health care relative to the GDP (see OECD, 2005a,b). There is a general consensus that technological development (and diffusion) is a prime driver of this phenomenon. The recent account by Smith et al. (2009) estimates that 27-48% of growth in the US health spending (1960-2007) is due to medical technology. Despite the relatively large literature documenting empirically the innovation in health care, theory has not been fully developed. In this paper we address a particular issue: the role of payment systems to the rate of technology adoption. We contribute to the theoretical literature by setting up a model of uncertain demand, where the technological shift is driven by the increased benefit for patients, financial variables, and the reimbursement system to providers. We seek to assess the impact of the payment system to providers on the rate of technology adoption. We propose two payment schemes, a reimbursement according to the cost of treating patients, and a DRG payment system where the new technology may or may not be reimbursed differently from the old technology. We find that under a cost reimbursement system, large enough patient benefits are necessary for adoption to occur. However, when the DRG contemplates a higher reimbursement for new technology, sufficiently large patient benefits are a sufficient condition for technology adoption to exist. In the absence of patient benefits, the margin gained with the new DRG associated with treatment with the new technology must be sufficiently high to compensate the cost of adoption. Finally, to compare the levels of technological adoption, we identify the values of the relevant parameters that for a given investment level, yield to the provider the same marginal return of investment in new capacity across regimes. Cost reimbursement leads to higher adoption of the new technology if the rate of reimbursement is high relative to the margin of new vs. old DRG. Having larger patient benefits favors more adoption under the cost reimbursement payment system, provided that adoption occurs initially under both payment systems.