An empirical analysis of the impact of choice on waiting times (original) (raw)
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Health Economics, 2007
Long waiting times for inpatient treatment in the UK National Health Service have been a source of popular and political concern, and therefore a target for policy initiatives. In the London Patient Choice Project, patients at risk of breaching inpatient waiting time targets were offered the choice of an alternative hospital with a guaranteed shorter wait. This paper develops a simple theoretical model of the effect of greater patient choice on waiting times. It then uses a difference in difference econometric methodology to estimate the impact of the London choice project on ophthalmology waiting times. In line with the model predictions, the project led to shorter average waiting times in the London region and a convergence in waiting times amongst London hospitals.
Is Patient Choice an Effective Mechanism to Reduce Waiting Times?
Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, 2004
initiatives in secondary care are part of policies aimed at reducing waiting times. This article provides evidence on the effectiveness of patient choice as a mechanism to reduce waiting times within a metropolitan area. The London Patient Choice Project was a large-scale pilot offering patients on hospital waiting lists a choice of alternative hospitals with shorter waiting times. A total of 22 500 patients were offered choice and 15 000 accepted. The acceptance rate of 66% was very high by international standards. In this article we address two questions. First, did the introduction of choice significantly reduce waiting times in London relative to the rest of the country where there was no choice? Second, how were the waiting times of London patients not offered choice affected by the choice regime? We examine the evidence on these issues for one specialty, orthopaedics. A difference-indifference analysis is used to compare waiting times for hospitals within London before and after the introduction of choice. Although there was a small but significant reduction in waiting times in London relative to other areas where there was no patient choice, the main effect of the choice regime was to produce convergence of mean waiting times within London. Convergence was achieved by bringing down waiting times at the hospitals with high waiting times to the levels that prevailed in hospitals with low waiting times. This represented a clear improvement in equity of access, an important objective of the English National Health Service.
2018
We study hospital choice in the publicly funded National Health Service in England, using a two sample strategy to identify a structural model of demand for elective procedures. In the NHS patients are allowed to opt out from the market of free-of-charge public hospitals and choose a private provider; we find that the outside option has an important effect on competition, patient choice and elasticities compared with traditional models ignoring the private sector. Considering endogeneity of waiting-time, proper measures of quality and the existence of private sector, we find substantially different policy conclusions compared to existing hospital demand models.
Disentangling the Effect of Waiting Times on Hospital Choice: Evidence from a Panel Data Analysis
SSRN Electronic Journal
This study examines the effect of waiting times on hospital choice by using patientlevel data on elective Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA) procedures in the Italian NHS over the years 2008-2011. We perform a multinomial logit analysis including conditional logit and mixed logit specifications. Our findings show the importance of jointly controlling for time-invariant and time varying dimensions of hospital quality in order to disentangle the effect of waiting times on hospital choice. We provide evidence that patients are responsive to changes in waiting times and aspects of clinical quality within hospitals over time, and estimate the trade-off that patients make between different hospital attributes. The results convey important policy implications for highly regulated health care markets.
International Journal of Health Care Finance & Economics, 2003
In this paper I model the demand for and supply of elective surgery using a modified Hotelling framework in which time, money, and distance are determinants of the demand for hospital care. Hospitals compete with each other in terms of the waiting time and consequently treat a certain number of patients. The basic model of hospital competition is then extended to incorporate the general practitioner (GP) fundholding scheme whereby the GPs are allocated a budget with which to buy care for their patients. Waiting time increases when production of care becomes more expensive, when the benefit obtained from treatment increases, when the unit cost of distance decreases, and when the importance given to time as a performance indicator decreases. The higher the money price the lower the waiting time. Finally, the money price paid by the GP fundholders is greater than that paid by the Health Authorities and greater than the hospitals marginal cost of production. As a consequence, fundholding patients pay a zero time price while non-fundholding patients experiment a positive waiting time.
Hospital Choice in a National Health System Competing with the Private Sector: A Tale of Two Samples
2019
We study choice in the publicly funded National Health Service in England using a structural model of demand for elective procedures. Patients are allowed to opt out from the market of free-of-charge public hospitals and choose a private provider. The model is identified by using a two-sample strategy making creative use of widely accessible administrative data on public and private providers. We find that the outside option has an important effect on patient choice compared with traditional models ignoring the private sector. Considering heterogeneity in patient preferences, endogeneity of waiting time, and the existence of private sector, we find different policy conclusions compared to traditional hospital demand models. JEL Classification Numbers D12, I11, I18, H51.
Dynamic hospital competition under rationing by waiting times
Journal of Health Economics, 2019
We develop a dynamic model of hospital competition where (i) waiting times increase if demand exceeds supply; (ii) patients choose a hospital based in part on waiting times; and (iii) hospitals incur waiting time penalties. We show that, whereas policies based on penalties will lead to lower waiting times, policies that promote patient choice will instead lead to higher waiting times. These results are robust to different game-theoretic solution concepts, designs of the hospital penalty structure, and patient utility specifications. Furthermore, waiting time penalties are likely to be more effective in reducing waiting times if they are designed with a linear penalty structure, but the counterproductive effect of patient choice policies is smaller when penalties are convex. These conclusions are partly derived by calibration of our model based on waiting times and elasticities observed in the English NHS for a common treatment (cataract surgery).
Heterogeneous effects of patient choice and hospital competition on mortality
Social science & medicine (1982), 2018
We examine whether the relaxation of constraints on patient choice of hospital in the English National Health Service in 2006 led to greater changes in mortality for hospitals which faced more rivals before the choice reform. We use patient level data from 2002 to 2010 for three high volume emergency conditions with high mortality risk: acute myocardial infarction (AMI) (288,279 patients), hip fracture (91,005 patients), stroke (214,103 patients). Since mortality risk varies by sub-diagnoses of AMI and stroke we include indicators for sub-diagnoses in the covariates. We also allow for the effect of covariates on mortality to differ before and after the 2006 choice reform. We find that the choice reform reduced mortality risk for hip fracture patients by 0.62% (95% CI: 1.22%, 0.01%), compared with the 2002/3-2010/11 mean of 3.5%, but had statistically insignificant negative effects for AMI and stroke. The reform also had heterogeneous effects across AMI and stroke sub-diagnoses, redu...
Quality decreases from introducing patient choice in a National Health Service
Portuguese Economic Journal
A view often expressed about patient choice of health care providers is that it will increase competition between providers, which benefits the efficiency of the health system. We address here a patient choice initiative, regarding selection of hospital for specialty consultations, in the Portuguese National Health Service (NHS) that has two specific features. The first feature involves shared decision making between patients and GPs, in the choice of hospital for referral, which should be based on publicly available information on "quality". The second specific feature is that the patient choice initiative did not involve payment changes to NHS hospitals associated with patients' movements. We show that explaining initial asymmetries in qualities (waiting times) with systematic differences in hospital characteristics (cost advantages and managerial talent) leads to potential asymmetric responses to the introduction of patient choice in the NHS. This implies that the empirical analysis has to accommodate such asymmetries. Explicitly allowing for asymmetries in responses to the policy measure reveals that reactions were indeed different, with top-performance hospitals reducing their qualities (increasing waiting times) after the patient choice initiative was introduced.