Hospital report cards: Quality competition and patient selection

Yijuan Chen, Peter Sivey*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    4 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Hospital ‘report cards’ policies involve governments publishing information about hospital quality. Such policies often aim to improve hospital quality by stimulating competition between hospitals. Previous empirical literature lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework for analysing the effects of report cards. We model a report card policy in a market where two hospitals compete for patients on quality under regulated prices. The report card policy improves the accuracy of the quality signal observed by patients. Hospitals may improve their published quality scores by costly quality improvement or by selecting healthier patients to treat. We show that increasing information through report cards always increases quality and only sometimes induces selection. Report cards are more likely to increase patient welfare when quality scores are well risk-adjusted, where the cost of selecting patients is high, and the cost of increasing quality is low.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number102484
    JournalJournal of Health Economics
    Volume78
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jul 2021

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Hospital report cards: Quality competition and patient selection'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this