Do responses to news matter? Evidence from interventional cardiology.

We examine physician responses to a global information shock and how these impact their patients. We exploit international news over the safety of an innovation in healthcare, the drug-eluting stent. We use data on interventional cardiologists' use of stents to define and measure cardiologists' responsiveness to the initial positive news and link this to their patients' outcomes. We find substantial heterogeneity in responsiveness to news. Patients treated by cardiologists who respond slowly to the initial positive news have fewer adverse outcomes. This is not due to patient-physician sorting. Instead, our results suggest that the differences are partially driven by slow responders being better at deciding when (not) to use the new technology, which in turn affects their patient outcomes.

Providers, peers and patients. How do physicians' practice environments affect patient outcomes?

We study how physicians' practice environments affect their treatment decisions and quality of care. Using clinical registry data from Sweden, we compare stent choices of cardiologists moving across hospitals over time. To disentangle changes in practice styles attributable to hospital- and peer group-specific factors, we exploit quasi-random variation on cardiologists working together on the same days. We find that migrating cardiologists' stent choices rapidly adapt to their new practice environment after relocation and are equally driven by the hospital and peer environments. In contrast, while decision errors increase, treatment costs and adverse clinical events remain largely unchanged despite the altered practice styles.

Subjective and objective quality and choice of hospital: Evidence from maternal care services in Germany.

We study patient choice of healthcare provider based on both objective and subjective quality measures in the context of maternal care hospital services in Germany. Objective measures are obtained from publicly reported clinical indicators, while subjective measures are based on satisfaction scores from a large and nationwide patient survey. We merge both quality metrics to detailed hospital discharge records and quantify the additional distance expectant mothers are willing to travel to give birth in maternity clinics with higher reported quality. Our results reveal that patients are on average willing to travel 0.1-2.7 additional kilometers for a one standard deviation increase in quality. Patients respond to both objective and subjective quality measures, suggesting that patient satisfaction scores may constitute important complements to clinical indicators when choosing provider.

Sex differences in sickness absence and the morbidity-mortality paradox: a longitudinal study using Swedish administrative registers.

OBJECTIVE: To analyse whether gender-specific health behaviour can be an explanation for why women outlive men, while having worse morbidity outcomes, known as the morbidity-mortality or gender paradox. SETTING: The working population in Sweden. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty per cent random sample of Swedish women and men aged 40-59 with a hospital admission in the 1993-2004 period were included. The sample for analysis consists of 233 274 individuals (115 430 men and 117 844 women) and in total 1 867 013 observations on sickness absence. INTERVENTION: Hospital admission across 18 disease categories. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The main outcome measures were sickness absence (morbidity) and mortality. Longitudinal data at the individual level allow us to study how sickness absence changed after a hospital admission in men and women using a difference-in-differences regression analysis. Cox regression models are used to study differences in mortality after the admission. RESULTS: Women increased their sickness absence after a hospital admission by around five more days per year than men (95% CI 5.25 to 6.22). At the same time, men had higher mortality in the 18 diagnosis categories analysed. The pattern of more sickness absence in women was the same across 17 different diagnosis categories. For neoplasm, with a 57% higher risk of death for men (54.18%-59.89%), the results depended on the imputation method of sickness for those deceased. By using the premortality means of sickness absence, men had an additional 14.47 (-16.30- -12.64) days of absence, but with zero imputation women had an additional 1.6 days of absence (0.05-3.20). Analyses with or without covariates revealed a coherent picture. CONCLUSIONS: The pattern of increased sickness absence (morbidity) and lower mortality in women provides evidence on the more proactive and preventive behaviour of women than of men, which could thus explain the morbidity-mortality paradox.

Estimating returns to hospital volume: Evidence from advanced cancer surgery.

High-volume hospitals typically perform better than low-volume hospitals. In this paper, we study whether such patterns reflect a causal effect of case volume on patient outcomes. To this end, we exploit closures and openings of entire cancer clinics in Swedish hospitals which provides sharp and arguably exogenous variation in case volumes. Using detailed register data on more than 100,000 treatment episodes of advanced cancer surgery, our results suggest substantial positive effects of operation volume on survival. Complementary analyses point to learning-by-doing as an important explanation.

Improving efficiency or impairing access? Health care consolidation and quality of care: Evidence from emergency hospital closures in Sweden.

Recent health care consolidation trends raise the important policy question whether improved emergency medical services and enhanced productivity can offset adverse quality effects from decreased access. This paper empirically analyzes how geographical distance from an emergency hospital affects the probability of surviving an acute myocardial infarction (AMI), accounting for health-based spatial sorting and data limitations on out-of-hospital mortality. Exploiting policy-induced variation in hospital distance derived from emergency hospital closures and detailed Swedish mortality data over two decades, results show a drastically decreasing probability of surviving an AMI as residential distance from a hospital increases one year after a closure occurred. The effect disappears in subsequent years, however, suggesting that involved agents quickly adapted to the new environment.