On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Thomas Hoe who has a PhD from University College London. If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch.
Title
Essays on the economics of health care provision
Supervisors
Richard Blundell, Orazio Attanasio
Repository link
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10048627/
What data do you use in your analyses and what are your main analytical methods?
I use data from the English National Health Service (NHS). One of the great features of the NHS is the centralized data it collects, with the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) containing information on every public hospital visit in England.
In my thesis, I primarily use two empirical approaches. In my work on trauma and orthopaedic departments, I exploit the fact that the number of emergency trauma admissions to hospital each day is random. This randomness allows me to conduct a quasi-experiment to assess how hospitals perform when they are more or less busy.
The second approach I use, in my work on emergency departments with Jonathan Gruber and George Stoye, is based on bunching techniques that originated in the tax literature (Chetty et al, 2013; Kleven and Waseem, 2013; Saez, 2010). These techniques use interpolation to infer how discontinuities in incentive schemes affect outcomes. We apply and extend these techniques to evaluate the impact of the ‘4-hour target’ in English emergency departments.
How did you characterise and measure quality in your research?
Measuring the quality of health care outcomes is always a challenge in empirical research. Since my research primarily relies on administrative data from HES, I use the patient outcomes that can be directly constructed from this data: in-hospital mortality, and unplanned readmission.
Mortality is, of course, an outcome that is widely used, and offers an unambiguous interpretation. Readmission, on the other hand, is an outcome that has gained more acceptance as a measure of quality in recent years, particularly following the implementation of readmission penalties in the UK and the US.
What is ‘crowding’, and how can it affect the quality of care?
I use the term crowding to refer, in a fairly general sense, to how busy a hospital is. This could mean that the hospital is physically very crowded, with lots of patients in close proximity to one another, or that the number of patients outstrips the available resources.
In practice, I evaluate how crowding affects quality of care by comparing hospital performance and patient outcomes on days when hospitals deal with different levels of admissions (due to random spikes in the number of trauma admissions). I find that hospitals respond by not only cancelling some planned admissions, such as elective hip and knee replacements, but also discharge existing patients sooner. For these discharged patients, the shorter-than-otherwise stay in the hospital is associated with poorer health outcomes for patients, most notably an increase in subsequent hospital visits (unplanned readmissions).
How might incentives faced by hospitals lead to negative consequences?
One of the strongest incentives faced by public hospitals in England is to meet the government-set waiting time target for elective care. This target has been very successful at reducing wait times. In doing so, however, it may have contributed to hospitals shortening patient stays and increasing patient admissions.
My research shows that shorter hospitals stays, in turn, can lead to increases in unplanned readmissions. Setting strong wait time targets, then, is in effect trading off shorter waits (from which patients benefit) with crowding effects (which may harm patients).
Your research highlights the importance of time in the hospital production process. How does this play out?
I look at this from three dimensions, each a separate part of a patient’s journey through hospital.
The first two relate to waiting for treatment. For elective patients, this means waiting for an appointment, and previous work has shown that patients attach significant value to reductions in these wait times. I show that trauma and orthopaedic patients would be better off with further wait time reductions, even if that leads to more crowding.
Emergency patients, in contrast, wait for treatment while physically in a hospital emergency department. I show that these waiting times can be very harmful and that by shortening these wait times we can actually save lives.
The third dimension relates to how long a patient spends in hospital recovering from surgery. I show that, at least on the margin of care for trauma and orthopaedic patients, an additional day in hospital has tangible benefits in terms of reducing the likelihood of experiencing an unplanned readmission.
How could your findings be practically employed in the NHS to improve productivity?
I would highlight two areas of my research that speak directly to the policy debate about NHS productivity.
First, while the wait time targets for elective care may have led to some crowding problems and subsequently more readmissions, the net benefit of these targets to trauma and orthopaedic patients is positive. Second, the wait time target for emergency departments also appears to have benefited patients: it saved lives at a reasonably cost-effective rate.
From the perspective of patients, therefore, I would argue these policies have been relatively successful and should be maintained.
