Work

Evaluating Measures of Hospital Quality: Evidence from Ambulance Referral Patterns

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: Hospital quality measures are crucial to a key idea behind health care payment reforms: "paying for quality" instead of quantity. Nevertheless, such measures face major criticisms largely over the potential failure of risk adjustment to overcome endogeneity concerns when ranking hospitals. In this paper we test whether patients treated at hospitals that score higher on commonly-used quality measures have better health outcomes in terms of rehospitalization and mortality. To compare similar patients across hospitals in the same market, we exploit ambulance company preferences as an instrument for hospital choice. We find that a variety of measures used by insurers to measure provider quality are successful: choosing a high-quality hospital compared to a low-quality hospital results in 10-15% better outcomes.

Source: The Review of Economics and Statistics

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00804

Authors: Joseph Doyle, John Graves, Jonathan Gruber

Institutions: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt University

Language: English

Topic: Healthcare Policy and Management

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute on Aging