Investigating the link between medical urgency and hospital efficiency – Insights from the German hospital market

This study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between hospitals’ urgency characteristics and their efficiency. Our analyses are based on 4094 observations from 1428 hospitals throughout Germany for the years 2015, 2 016, and 2017. We calculate an average urgency score for each hospital based on all cases treated in that hospital per year and also investigate the within-hospital dispersion of medical urgency. To analyze the association of these urgency measures with hospitals’ efficiency we use a two-stage dou ble bootstrap data envelopment analysis approach with truncated regression. We find a negative relationship between the urgency score and hospital efficiency. When testing for non-linear effects, the results reveal a u-shaped association, indicating that having either a high or low overall urgency s core is beneficial in terms of efficiency. Finally, our results reveal that higher within-hospital urgency dispersion is negatively related to efficiency.
Source: Health Care Management Science - Category: Health Management Source Type: research