COVID-19, nursing home quality and vaccination

Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…

How good is Nursing Home Compare?

In the past few weeks, I discussed how well Hospital Compare does on measuring the quality of hospital care (see here and here).  Now, I turn to how well Nursing Home Compare does on truly measuring quality of care.  A study by Brauner et al. (2018) attempts to answer this question.  They compare the quality…

How can we keep people out of the hospital?

One idea is to provide additional funding for both formal and informal caregiving services.  For instance, one could subsidize nursing homes or home health agencies on the formal side; for informal caregiving, one could give stipends to individuals to care for their elderly parents.  The question is, does this implementation actually work? This is the…

Quality of care and prices

There have been a number of studies that have examined how publicly reporting quality ratings (for health plans, physicians, hospitals or other health care providers) affects market share.  Less attention has been paid to the effect of measured quality on health care prices.  A paper by Huang and Hirth (2016) aim to answer just this…

Will technology replace nurses?

Many people have feared that robots, computers, and other forms of technology will take people’s jobs. Conventional wisdom holds that healthcare workers have been largely immune from these technological changes to date. However, a new paper from Lu, Rui and Seidmann examines whether technological advances–specifically computerized provider order entry (CPOE)–affects employment at nursing homes. Using…