Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Much of my own research has focused on how physician financial incentives affect the quantity and quality of medical care. It should come as no surprise that I found a recent New York Times article on the topic stimulating. Dr. Sandjeep Jauhar examines how hospital and physician financial incentives affect the length of a patient’s…
Efficiency in the field of economics increases when either 1) outputs are increased for a given level of inputs, or 2) inputs are decreased for a given level of output. Estimating efficiency in the medical field is more difficult, however, since the output (marginal health improvement) is difficult to measure. In the area of hospitals,…
The Denver Post has an interesting article about employee theft of drugs from hospitals. Stealing from a hospital is not easy: “Hospitals guard drugs carefully, requiring staffers to use individual codes or even fingerprints to unlock cabinets where drugs are stored. At Rose [Medical Center], an electronic system tracks narcotics from the time they arrive…
Measuring efficiency in health care is extremely difficult. If there was an accurate scientific measure of patient health (e.g., a 1-100 scale) before and after treatment. That way, one could measure changes in health before and after treatment per every dollar spent. However, measuring health outcomes is very difficult. In the academic literature, hospital efficiency most commonly…
What are hospitals like in the Netherlands? A paper by Blank and Van Hulst (2009) give some insight. The paper studies Dutch general hospitals. These hospitals make up 80% of beds on 70% of hospital costs. Non-general hospitals include academic hospitals and specialty hospitals (e.g., eye clinics and rehabilitation clinics). Hospitals in the Netherlands “Hospitals,…
Four months ago, I wrote that the health care sector added jobs despite the overwhelming job losses in the rest of the economy. Looks like the health care sector has not been fully insulated against the economic woes: ” Six out of ten hospitals nationally are seeing a greater proportion of patients without insurance coming through…
How do hospitals estimate the cost of different inpatient stays? A paper by Clement et al. (2009) reviews 3 techniques: Microcosting. “With microcosting, a detailed list of each component of a patient’s care is created and costed separately for each facet of a patient’s hospitalization. Given the level of detail, microcosting is generally considered the…
At the turn of the century, California passed laws mandating minimum nurse-to-patient ratios. These laws went into effect in 2004. Initially, the nurse patient ratio was 1:6, but those ratios were decreased to 1:5 in 2005. Do minimum nurse staffing laws increase the quality of medical care or do they simply increase costs and…
In Turkey, the number of private hospitals has expanded from 250 in 2006 to 375 in 2008. Healthcare Europa reports that Turkish private hospitals previously charged whatever prices they pleased. The government health insurance plan would pay the basic rate to the private hospitals, and the patient would be responsible for any difference between the…
A hospital is a place of healing. It can also be a place of injury. In the U.S., 2.9% of people who enter the hospital are actually harmed by the care they receive. Yet what are the costs of these injuries? A paper by Encinosa and Hellinger (HSR 2008) attempts to estimate the cost of hospitals failing…