As healthcare costs and premiums have increased in the recent past, hospitals are forced to try to provide healthcare on tight budgets. In many cases, quality is often sacrificed in an effort to manage patient wait-times and costs. This research attempted to add to the existing body of knowledge of quality of care by defining a relationship between quality of care provided and total hospital costs. This study used the 2006 American Hospital Associations Annual Survey Database and the 2006 Hospital Compare dataset to meet the data requirements for the study. A log-log, as well as a translog, cost function was used to estimate the relationship between quality of care provisioned for community acquired pneumonia and heart failure and total hospital costs. Regressors for the cost function included hospital outputs, inputs and wages as well as variables for patient-mix, case-mix, ownership status and medical school affiliation. Ultimately this study concluded that by increasing the quality of care score associated with community-acquired pneumonia by ten percent would decrease total hospital costs by 2.44 percent. However, several improvements were found that would improve the ability of the quality of care data and estimation methodologies to more comprehensively represent quality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-08312013-094009 |
| Date | 12 September 2013 |
| Creators | Newell, Jordan Andrew |
| Contributors | Portier, Ralph Joseph, Fannin, James Matthew, Keithly, Walter R Jr |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-08312013-094009/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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