 Hospital ownership and quality of care: what explains the different results in the literature?Karen Eggleston, Yu‐Chu Shen, Joseph Lau, Christopher H. Schmid and Jia Chan Health Economics, 2008, vol. 17, issue 12, 1345-1362 Abstract: This systematic review examines what factors explain the diversity of findings regarding hospital ownership and quality. We identified 31 observational studies written in English since 1990 that used multivariate analysis to examine quality of care at nonfederal general acute, short‐stay US hospitals. We find that pooled estimates of ownership effects are sensitive to the subset of studies included and the extent of overlap among hospitals analyzed in the underlying studies. Ownership does appear to be systematically related to differences in quality among hospitals in several contexts. Whether studies find for‐profit and government‐controlled hospitals to have higher mortality rates or rates of adverse events than their nonprofit counterparts depends on data sources, time period, and region covered. Policymakers should be aware of the underlying reasons for conflicting evidence in this literature, and the strengths and weaknesses of meta‐analytic synthesis. The ‘true’ effect of ownership appears to depend on institutional context, including differences across regions, markets, and over time. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Date: 2008 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:17:y:2008:i:12:p:1345-1362 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. |
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