Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP9272
Authors: Laurent Gobillon; Carine Milcent
Abstract: Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status on hospital quality. When age, sex, diagnoses and co-morbidities are held constant, the mortality rates in for-profit and university hospitals are similar, but they are lower than in public non-teaching hospitals. When additionally controlling for innovative procedures, the mortality rate is higher in for-profit hospitals than in the two groups of public hospitals. This suggests that the quality of care in for-profit hospitals relies on innovative procedures and that, after controlling for case-mix and innovative treatments, there is a better quality of care in public hospitals.
Keywords: hospital quality; innovative procedures; stratified duration model
JEL Codes: I12; I18
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| hospital ownership status (L32) | in-hospital mortality rates (I14) |
| for-profit hospitals (L39) | in-hospital mortality rates (I14) |
| innovative procedures (O35) | hospital quality (I19) |
| ownership status (R21) | hospital quality (I19) |
| public hospitals (I18) | in-hospital mortality rates (I14) |