Evaluating Measures of Hospital Quality: Evidence from Ambulance Referral Patterns
Name
rest_a_00804.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
226.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
023d64c29a6ca97ad188b17d4392ea55
Author(s)
Doyle, Joseph
Graves, John
Gruber, Jonathan
Date Issued
2019
Journal
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Publisher
MIT Press - Journals
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 that insurers use to measure provider quality are successful: choosing a high-quality hospital compared to a low-quality hospital results in 10% to 15% better outcomes.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_A_00804
