Background Medicare Advantage (MA) penetration rates have shown an increase in rural areas in the past decade, increasing the bargaining power of MA plans relative to rural hospitals. We study the effect that this increase has had in the revenue of rural hospitals through reductions in the...

Introduction The annual increase in emergency department (ED) visits in Taiwan has led to overcrowding in major hospitals and extended patient stays in the ED. International studies suggest that prolonged ED stays may influence healthcare costs and clinical outcomes for hospitalized patients....

Background China started a pilot public hospital reform in 2012 to improve governance and efficiency in healthcare services delivery among county-level hospitals. This study aims to investigate the impact of the pilot reform on hospital efficiency and productivity by using a unique dataset of...

Patient selection remains a major challenge in evaluating hospital performance. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of patients to hospitals, based on a rotation schedule between hospitals in the Upper Austrian capital of Linz. In the instrumental variable (IV) framework, we use high-quality...

We study whether the quality of managers can affect public service provision in the context of public health. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we show how the introduction of a competitive recruitment system and better pay for public hospital CEOs reduced hospital mortality by...

The tourism and hospitality sector are a key driver of Sub-Saharan Africa's economic growth, and a major source of foreign reserves and jobs: the sector has the potential to add 168 billion dollars in domestic revenue and foreign exchange, to strengthen supply chains, and to create over 18...

Objective: This study aims to investigate whether specific treatments or combinations of treatments are significantly associated with the profitability of Swiss acute-care hospitals under the current diagnosis-related group (S-DRG) reimbursement system, while accounting for differences between...

Objective: Even in highly regulated and advanced health care markets, treatment costs and outcome quality substantially vary across facilities. Interhospital variation - particularly when it is not attributable to different patient compositions - might indicate inefficiencies in the health care...

Background The objective of this study is to assess if waiting times for elective surgeries within the Portuguese National Health Service (NHS) are influenced by the waiting times at neighboring hospitals. Recognizing these interdependencies, and their extent, is crucial for understanding how...

Background The mismatch of medical resources is a significant issue in global healthcare, undermining both service accessibility and system efficiency. In China, despite the implementation of the "Healthy China" strategy, persistent mismatches remain due to factors such as industrialization,...

Background In this paper, we propose a novel model that allows us to understand the effect of hospital readmis- sions on technology and costs. To do this, we consider that hospitals may experience heterogeneous discharges: on the one hand, discharges corresponding to patients who have completed...

(1) Background: The aim of the paper is to identify and assess if there are differences concerning the cash conversion cycle (CCC) according to different types of ownership authority of hospitals. The main research hypothesis developed for the purpose of this study assumes that the ownership...

Narrow hospital networks have proliferated in health systems with managed care. We investigate the causal effect of network breadth on mortality leveraging the termination of the largest health insurer in Colombia. The termination caused a substantial increase in mortality accompanied by...

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...

Background While COVID-19 hospitalization costs are essential for policymakers to make informed health care resource decisions, little is known about these costs in western Europe. The aim of the current study is to analyze these costs for a German setting, track the development of these costs...

Background Traumatic injuries are rising globally, disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries, constituting 88% of the burden of surgically treatable conditions. While contributing to the highest burden, LMICs also have the least availability of resources to address this...

Background Morocco is engaged in a health system reform aimed at generalizing health insurance across the whole population by 2025. This study aims to build a national database of costs at all levels of public hospitals in Morocco and craft this database as a resource for further use in a...

Background Hospital services are typically reimbursed using case-mix tools that group patients according to diagnoses and procedures. We recently developed a case-mix tool (i.e., the Queralt system) aimed at supporting clinicians in patient management. In this study, we compared the performance...

Background Obstetric fistula is incident and prevalent in low-income countries. Globally, about 100,000 women develop fistula annually. In Mozambique, more than 2,000 fistulas are reported annually. A national strategy to com- bat obstetric fistula has been implemented in Mozambique from...

We investigate the factors that influence the variance in hospital charges and inpatient care for kidney transplant cases in the US. Using the AHRQ's (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) HCUP's (Hospital Cost and Utilization Project) NIS (National Inpatient Sample) database, we find that...

Background Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease (ASCVD) is a global public health concern. This study aimed to estimate the healthcare resource utilization (HRU) and costs stratified by cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk categories using real-world evidence, in a regional population in...

This report describes the results of an epidemiological and genomic study carried out in six hospitals in Romania to determine the extent of the spread of Providencia stuartii carrying blaNDM-1. Most of the 74 submitted P. stuartii isolates were resistant to penicillins, cephalosporins,...

In this paper, we examine trends in provider fees charged, government expenditure on private out-of-hospital medical services, and out of pocket costs following policy changes intended to reduce government expenditure. We examine the experience of a high-need patient group: people diagnosed with...

This study presents a comparative analysis of inpatient care data from six countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Croatia, Estonia, and the Republic of Korea). It uses diagnosis related groups (DRGs) as a framework for benchmarking. The primary aim of the study is to propose methods for comparing...

Background: Facebook ratings provide relevant information and data on hospital quality for individual patients, the hospitals themselves and the institutions responsible for the quality assessment of hospitals. However, there are still considerable doubts in the healthcare sector about the...

Contract theory offers a simple and wildly effective solution to surprise bills: Hospital admissions contracts are contracts with open price terms, which contract law imputes with market rates. This solution not only obviated the costly, time-consuming, and complicated (and still unimplemented)...