How important are delays in treatment for health outcomes? The case of ambulance response time and cardiovascular events
Elena Lucchese
Health Economics, 2024, vol. 33, issue 4, 652-673
Abstract:
The cost effectiveness of medical treatments is not precisely known due to the compounding effect of multiple determining factors. Ambulance response time (RT) to emergency calls is exploited to learn more about the effect of the timing of treatment on health outcomes. This causal relation is identified by exploiting rainfall at the time of the ambulance run as a shock to RT. The analysis focuses on patients who have undergone a cardiac event and shows that a one‐minute increase in average RT leads to 105 more deaths each year in one Italian region. Finally, the economic value of the lives that would be saved by reducing RT is quantified to facilitate policymaking.
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4791
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:33:y:2024:i:4:p:652-673
Access Statistics for this article
Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones
More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().