Physician Workload and Hospital Reimbursement: Overworked Physicians Generate Less Revenue per Patient

Adam Powell (), Sergei Savin () and Nicos Savva ()
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Adam Powell: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Sergei Savin: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Nicos Savva: London Business School, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA, United Kingdom

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2012, vol. 14, issue 4, 512-528

Abstract: We study the impact of physician workload on hospital reimbursement utilizing a detailed data set from the trauma department of a major urban hospital. We find that the proportion of patients assigned a "high-severity" status for reimbursement purposes, which maps, on average, to a 47.8% higher payment for the hospital, is substantially reduced as the workload of the discharging physician increases. This effect persists after we control for a number of systematic differences in patient characteristics, condition, and time of discharge. Furthermore, we show that it is unlikely to be caused by selection bias or endogeneity in either discharge timing or allocation of discharges to physicians. We attribute this phenomenon to a workload-induced reduction in diligence of paperwork execution. We estimate the associated monetary loss to be approximately 1.1% (95% confidence interval, 0.4%-1.9%) of the department's annual revenue.

Keywords: empirical; hospital operations; healthcare reimbursement; workload management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormsom:v:14:y:2012:i:4:p:512-528

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