Book/Printed Material Can ranking hospitals on the basis of patients' travel distances improve quality of care?
About this Item
Title
- Can ranking hospitals on the basis of patients' travel distances improve quality of care?
Summary
- "Conventional outcomes report cardsƯ public disclosure of information about the patient-background-adjusted health outcomes of individual hospitals and physicians -- may help improve quality, but they may also encourage providers to "game" the system by avoiding sick and/or seeking healthy patients. In this paper, I propose an alternative approach: ranking hospitals on the basis of the travel distances of their Medicare patients. At least in theory, a distance report card could dominate conventional outcomes report cards: a distance report card might measure quality of care at least as well but suffer less from selection problems. I use data on elderly Medicare beneficiaries with heart attack and stroke from 1994 and 1999 to show that a distance report card would be both valid Ư that is, correlated with true quality Ư and able to distinguish confidently among hospitals Ư that is, able to reject at conventional significance levels the hypothesis that the true quality of a low-ranked hospital was the same as the quality of the average hospital. The hypothetical distance report card I propose compares favorably to (although does not necessarily dominate) the California AMI outcomes report card"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Names
- Kessler, Daniel P.
- National Bureau of Economic Research
Created / Published
- Cambridge, MA : National Bureau of Economic Research, c2005.
Headings
- - Hospitals--Evaluation
- - Medicare
- - Patients
- - Transportation
Notes
- - Title from PDF file as viewed on 7/11/2005.
- - Includes bibliographical references.
- - Also available in print.
- - Mode of access: World Wide Web.
- - System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Call Number/Physical Location
- HB1
Digital Id
- https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcebookspublic.2005618405
- http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11419 External
Library of Congress Control Number
- 2005618405
Access Advisory
- Unrestricted online access
Online Format
- image