Follow Your Heart: Survival Chances and Costs after Heart Attacks-An Instrumental Variable Approach.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

To determine the effect of heart attack patients' access to intensive treatment on mortality and costs.

Data sources

Administrative data of 4,920 patients with acute myocardial infarction from the Austrian Social Security Database and the Upper Austrian Sickness Fund for the period 2002-2011.

Study design

As treatment intensity in a hospital largely depends on whether it has a catheterization laboratory, we explore the effects of patients' initial admission to such specialized percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) hospitals. To account for the nonrandom selection of patients into hospitals, we exploit individuals' place of residence as a source of exogenous variation in an instrumental variable framework.

Principal findings

We find that the initial

SUBMITTER: Sanwald A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5264016 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature