Background: Informed consent (IC) is a legally enforceable right in South Africa based on constitutionally protected rights to bodily integrity and well-being. In terms of the law, patients cannot be involved in medical treatment or research without IC. Healthcare providers must inform patients...

We report an empirical analysis of the responses of the supply and demand for secondary care to waiting list size and waiting times. Whereas previous empirical analyses have used data aggregated to area level, our analysis is novel in that it focuses on the supply responses of a single hospital...

A nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second,...

In this article, we analyse the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximises its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is...

The paper estimates cost efficiency of 99 general hospitals in the Czech Republic during 2001-2008 using Stochastic Frontier Analysis. We estimate a baseline model and also a model accounting for various inefficiency determinants. Group-specific inefficiency is present even having taken care of...

We analyzed the impact of social networks on general practitioners' (GPs) referral behavior based on administrative panel data from 2,684,273 referrals to resident specialists made between 1998 and 2007. To construct estimated social networks, we used information on the doctors' place and time...

One cornerstone of current attempts to reform the German public health care system by introducing private insurance schemes is the assumption that economic incentives play an important role in individual decision-making about using medical help. This hypothesis is examined for the case of demand...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

Using a newly available and multifaceted dataset provided by the German Federal Statistical Office, this paper is the first to investigate both technical and cost efficiency of more than 1500 German general hospitals conducting a stochastic frontier analysis. The empirical results for the years...