Quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of heart attack treatment in Germany

Corinna Hentschker and Ansgar Wübker ()

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2020, issue Latest Articles, 1-15

Abstract: Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this analysis we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart attack treatment, on mortality. We use a full sample of administrative hospital data from Germany for the years 2005 to 2007. To account for non-random treatment assignment of PTCA, instrumental variable approaches are implemented that aim to randomize patients into getting PTCA independent of heart attack severity. Instruments include differential distances to PTCA hospitals and regional PTCA rates. Our results suggest a 4.5 absolute percentage point mortality reduction for patients who have access to PTCA compared to patients receiving only conservative treatment. We relate mortality reduction to the additional costs for this treatment and conclude that PTCA treatment is cost-effective in lowering mortality for AMI patients at reasonable cost-effectiveness thresholds.

Keywords: Acute myocardial infarction; instrumental variables; mortality; quasi-experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/225002/1/Q ... tment-in-Germany.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of heart attack treatment in Germany (2020)
Working Paper: Quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of heart attack treatment in Germany (2018)
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:zbw:espost:225002

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2020.1765964

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().