期刊名称：Discussion Papers in Economics / Department of Economics, University of York
出版年度：2018
卷号：2018
出版社：University of York
摘要：Health outcomes, such as mortality and readmission rates, are commonly used as indicators of hospital quality and as a basis to design pay-for-performance (P4P) incentive schemes. We propose a model of hospital behaviour under P4P where patients differ in severity and can choose hospital based on quality. We assume that risk-adjustment is not fully accounted for and that unobserved dimensions of severity remain. We show that the introduction of P4P which rewards lower mortality and/or readmission rates can weaken or strengthen hospitals’ incentive to provide quality. Since patients with higher severity have a different probability of exercising patient choice when quality varies, this introduces a selection bias (patient composition effect) which in turn alters quality incentives. We also show that this composition effect increases with the degree of competition. Critically, readmission rates suffer from one additional source of selection bias through mortality rates since quality affects the distribution of survived patients. This implies that the scope for counterproductive effects of P4P is larger when financial rewards are linked to readmission rates rather than mortality rates. We also show that our results are robust in the presence of public reporting, and discuss welfare implications.
关键词：quality; pay-for-performance; health outcomes; performance indicators; heterogeneous severity; selection bias.
