Volume-outcome relationship and minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector: Evidence from nationwide administrative hospital data for the year 2005-2007

Corinna Hentschker, Roman Mennicken (), Antonius Reifferscheid, Juergen Wasem and Ansgar Wübker ()

No 720, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: This paper analyses the volume-outcome relationship and the effects of minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector. We use a full sample of administrative data from the unselected, complete German hospital population for the years 2005 to 2007. We apply regression methods to analyze the association between volume and hospital quality. We measure hospital quality with a binary variable, which indicates whether the patient has died in hospital. Using simulation techniques we examine the impact of the minimum volume regulations on the accessibility of hospital services. We find a highly significant negative relationship between case volume and mortality for complex interventions at the pancreas and oesophagus as well as for knee replacement. For liver, kidney and stem cell transplantation as well as for CABG we could not find a strong association between volume and quality. Access to hospital care is only moderately affected by minimum volume regulations. The effectiveness of minimum volume regulations depends on the type of intervention. Depending on the type of intervention, quality gains can be expected at the cost of slightly decreased access to care.

Keywords: Volume; hospital quality; mortality; access to care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/172473/1/rep_17_720.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Volume-outcome relationship and minimum volume regulations in the German hospital sector – evidence from nationwide administrative hospital data for the years 2005–2007 (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:rwirep:720

DOI: 10.4419/86788840

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().