Hospitals face digital divide tied to socioeconomic status: Study

Hospitals serving socioeconomically disadvantaged communities are less likely to adopt health IT tools such as telehealth and health information exchange platforms.

The finding comes from a study published Sept. 5 in JAMA Health Forum, which analyzed 16,646 hospital-level and 9,218 health information exchange observations from the American Hospital Association’s annual survey and annual IT survey between 2018 and 2023. Researchers linked the data to an area deprivation index and found that adoption gaps persisted across multiple measures.

Hospitals in the most disadvantaged areas had negative marginal effects of 0.03 for treatment-stage telehealth, 0.03 for postdischarge telehealth, 0.03 for electronic data query and 0.06 for electronic data availability.

Participation in accountable care organizations was associated with higher adoption across all functionalities, with marginal effects ranging from +0.02 to +0.07. Researchers said this suggests that value-based models may help reduce digital inequities.

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