Adoption and learning across hospitals: The case of a revenue-generating practice.

ABSTRACT: Performance-raising practices tend to diffuse slowly in the health care sector. To understand how incentives drive adoption, I study a practice that generates revenue for hospitals: submitting detailed documentation about patients. After a 2008 reform, hospitals could raise their Medicare revenue over 2% by always specifying a patient's type of heart failure. Hospitals only captured around half of this revenue, indicating that large frictions impeded takeup. Exploiting the fact that many doctors practice at multiple hospitals, I find that four-fifths of the dispersion in adoption reflects differences in the ability of hospitals to extract documentation from physicians. A hospital's adoption of coding is robustly correlated with its heart attack survival rate and its use of inexpensive surv

SUBMITTER: Sacarny A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9175183 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature