Learning Curves of Agents with Diverse Skills in Information Technology-Enabled Physician Referral Systems
Authors: Mukhopadhyay, Tridas; Singh, ParamVir; Kim, Seung Hyun
Journal: Information Systems Research (2011)
<jats:p> To improve operational efficiencies while providing state of the art healthcare services, hospitals rely on information technology enabled physician referral systems (IT-PRS). This study examines learning curves in an IT-PRS setting to determine whether agents achieve performance improvements from cumulative experience at different rates and how information technologies transform the learning dynamics in this setting. We present a hierarchical Bayes model that accounts for different agent skills (domain and system) and estimate learning rates for three types of referral requests: emergency (EM), nonemergency (NE), and nonemergency out of network (NO). Furthermore, the model accounts for learning spillovers among the three referral request types and the impact of system upgrade on learning rates. We estimate this model using data from more than 80,000 referral requests to a large IT-PRS. We find that: (1) The IT-PRS exhibits a learning rate of 4.5% for EM referrals, 7.2% for NE referrals, and 12.3% for NO referrals. This is slower than the learning rate of manufacturing (on average 20%) and more comparable to other service settings (on average, 8%). (2) Domain and system e…