New evidence on supplier-induced demand in China ’s public tertiary hospitals: is the cost of hospitalization higher in the off-season?

This study, therefore, aims to add new evidence on SID in China’s public tertiary hospitals and facilitates the development of evidence-based health policies in China and other countries with similar h ealthcare systems. For this study, we used patient-level electronic medical records (EMRs) collected from the information systems of tertiary hospitals in a western province in China. From 11 tertiary hospitals, we collected 274,811 hospitalization records dated between 15 February and 30 November 2 019. Total expenditure on hospitalization and length of admission of each patient were the primary metrics for measuring SID. We constructed a character indicator to measure the high-season or off-season status of hospitals, and log-linear estimations were applied to estimate the “off-season effec t” on hospitalized expenditures and length of admission. We find that the cost of hospitalization is indeed higher in the off-season in China’s public tertiary hospitals; specifically, expenditures for patients admitted in the off-season increased by an average of 5.3–7.9% compared to patients admitted in the peak season, while the length of admission in the hospital increased by an average of 6.8% to 10.2%. We also checked the robustness of our findings by performing subgroup analyses of EMRs in the city-level hospitals and surgical group. We name this phenomenon the “hospital off-sea son effect” and suggest that the main reason for it is inappropriate financial incentives c...
Source: The European Journal of Health Economics - Category: Health Management Source Type: research