Surgical Complications and Mortality Rates

Mortality during surgery is dependent on two factors.  The first is the probability of having complications during surgery.  The second is the probability of dying conditional on having a complication.  One would expect that hospitals with low mortality rates would have both fewer complications and lower probability of death conditional on a complication.   A…

Dutch Hospital Industry

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,…

Economic Woes Hit 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…

Costing Methods

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…

Turkish Hospitals

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…

Uwe Reinhardt on Hospital Prices

Health Economist Uwe Reinhardt supports expanding the DRG system to all payers.   “Under Medicare’s approach, hospitals are paid one price for an entire inpatient episode, rather than piece-rate (fee-for-service) for every single supply and service delivered in that episode…To eliminate the rampant price-discrimination inherent in current hospital pricing, all hospitals under this system would…

Optimal Contracts in the British NHS

One of the perennial questions of interest for health services researchers how to pay for health care.  A paper by Chalkley and McVicar (2008) examines this question in the contest of a reform in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). “After 1990 hospitals, which had previously been under the direct control of Health Authorities, could apply for NHS…