Does hospital advertising influence patient choice and health outcomes? We examine more than 220,000 individual patient-level visits over 24 months in Massachusetts to answer this question. We find that patients are positively influenced by hospital advertising; seeing a television advertisement...

In this study, we examine the hospital’s ability to admit patients from its emergency department. From a medical perspective, the number of patients being admitted should depend solely on the patients’ clinical conditions. Using a large scale econometric study that includes detailed...

The current state of outpatient healthcare delivery is characterized by capacity shortages and long waits for appointments. Yet a substantial fraction of valuable doctors’ capacity is wasted due to no-shows. In this paper, we examine the effect of wait to appointment on patient flow,...

This paper studies heuristic thinking and cognitive bias using a natural experiment from the field. The setting for the study is a set of acute care hospitals, where we examine the care process and discharge decisions for individual patients. Determining a patient’s suitability for discharge...