Can Ranking Hospitals on the Basis of Patients' Travel Distances Improve Quality of Care?
30 Pages Posted: 6 Jul 2005 Last revised: 15 Sep 2022
Date Written: June 2005
Abstract
Conventional outcomes report cards-- 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 -- that is, correlated with true quality -- and able to distinguish confidently among hospitals -- 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.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
The Effect of Information on Product Quality: Evidence from Restaurant Hygiene Grade Cards
By Ginger Zhe Jin and Phillip Leslie
-
Is More Information Better? The Effects of 'Report Cards' on Health Care Providers
By David Dranove, Daniel P. Kessler, ...
-
Mandatory vs. Voluntary Disclosure in Markets with Informed and Uninformed Customers
-
By Cory S. Capps, David Dranove, ...
-
Effects of Information Provision in an Vertically Differentiated Market
By Tasneem Chipty and Ann Dryden Witte
-
By David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman, ...
-
Do Report Cards Tell Consumers Anything They Don't Already Know? the Case of Medicare Hmos
By Leemore S. Dafny and David Dranove
-
By Avi Dor, Michael Grossman, ...
-
Intermediaries as Quality Assessors: Tour Operators in the Travel Industry
By Sofronis Clerides, Paris Nearchou, ...
-
Diversity and Demand Externalities: How Cheap Information Can Reduce Welfare
By Heski Bar-isaac, Guillermo Caruana, ...