We investigate the impact of a large new public hospital on directly observed waiting times in emergency departments of other public hospitals in Nicaragua. Using a difference-indifferences design, we estimate a significant decrease in waiting time by 42% or 10.1 minutes in nearby hospitals...

The German healthcare system faces urgent challenges, with Minister Karl Lauterbach proposing two major reforms: restructuring hospital financing and overhauling emergency services. While past efforts to reform emergency care have failed, the current crisis - exacerbated by staff shortages and...

Das deutsche Gesundheitswesen steht vor einer Vielzahl an Herausforderungen, die sich aus dem demografischen Wandel, den Anforderungen an eine solide Finanzierung und Wirtschaftlichkeit, der Notwendigkeit zur Entbürokratisierung und der Digitalisierung ergeben. Im Mittelpunkt dieses...

Addressing hospital emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a critical challenge for many healthcare systems worldwide. Many hospitals (including our partner hospital) have been experimenting with innovative patient flow designs to address this challenge. A promising new design is to separate...

Background Forecasting patient arrivals to hospital emergency departments is critical to dealing with surges and to efcient planning, management and functioning of hospital emerency departments. Objective We explore whether past mean values and past observations are useful to forecast daily...

Using daily variation in wind power generation in the western portion of Texas, we show that the resulting lower fossil fuel generation in the eastern portion of the state leads to air-quality improvements and, subsequently, to fewer emergency department (ED) visits. Spatially, the impact on...

Overcrowded Emergency Departments (EDs) across locations struggle to improve patient experience while dealing with long waits, which erodes medical and financial performance. We investigate whether and how managers could improve patient satisfaction by communicating waits to patients.We conduct...

In this paper, we examine the impact of information technology (IT)-enabled ridesharing platforms on healthcare demands, specifically at hospitals’ emergency departments (EDs). We consider the rollout of ridesharing platforms over time in distinct locations and analyze changes in Emergency...

Problem definition: Emergency Departments (EDs) impose a complicated service process on patients and accompanying family members (from now: people). ED patients typically encounter long waits, various procedures, and multiple staff members. People lack knowledge about the various elements their...

Problem definition: Emergency department (ED) delay announcement systems are implemented in many countries. We answer three important questions pertaining to the operations and effectiveness of such systems by studying the public hospital network and ED waiting time (WT) announcement system in...

A common surge-capacity policy in busy emergency departments (EDs) is to admit patients from the waiting area to hallway beds as the regular beds fill up. Despite its prevalence, the decision on who to place in a hallway bed, and when, is mostly on an ad-hoc basis and there are no well-defined...

We examine whether loss of emergency department services is associated with county-level mortality rates in rural areas over the period 2005-2018. We use a propensity-weighted difference-in-difference approach, comparing counties that lost emergency department services to counties that retained...

We examine the impact of the opening of a new urgent care center (UCC) on health care costs and the utilization of care among nearby Medicare beneficiaries. We focus on 2006-2016, a period of rapid UCC expansion. We find that total Medicare spending rises when residents of a zip code are first...

Background: Patient demand for emergency medical services continues to rise from all-time highs. ED physicians generally respond to this rising demand by increasing their level of multitasking. Aim: What leads ED physicians to select which patients, and how many patients, they will treat?...

Cesarean delivery for low-risk pregnancies is generally associated with worse health outcomes for infants and mothers. The interpretation of this correlation, however, is confounded by potential selectivity in the choice of birth mode. We use birth records from California, merged with hospital...

This paper explores the use of heuristics among highly-trained physicians diagnosing heart disease in the emergency department, a common task with lifeor- death consequences. Using data from a large private-payer claims database, I find compelling evidence of heuristic thinking in this setting:...

A substantial literature has studied the influence of malpractice pressure on physician behavior. However, these studies generally focus on malpractice pressure stemming from state laws that govern liability exposure, which may be unknown or not salient to physicians. We test how physicians...

Medicare pricing is known to indirectly influence provider prices and care provision for non-Medicare patients; however, Medicare's regulatory externalities beyond fee-setting are less well understood. We study how physicians' outpatient surgery choices for non-Medicare patients responded to...

The continuing drug overdose crisis in the U.S. has highlighted the urgent need for greater access to treatment. This paper examines the impact of openings and closings of substance abuse treatment facilities in New Jersey on emergency room visits for substance abuse issues among nearby...

Arcadia Medical Center's newly appointed medical director of operations for the department of emergency medicine has noticed a gradual increase in the length of time it takes for patients to be seen and their care completed. He frequently examines patients who are waiting in their stretchers in...

Urgent care centers (UCCs) are a cost-efficient substitute to the emergency department (ED) for non-emergent conditions, but no study has identified their impact on ED demand. We address this gap using a novel strategy that exploits daily UCC operating times in a differencing framework. After...

A number of False Claims Act lawsuits have alleged that managers at for-profithospitals pressured physicians, using feedback and manipulation of defaults, to admit patientsunnecessarily from the emergency department. Using 100% hospital records from Florida for2015-2017, we estimate that...

We study the behavior of batching by discretionary workers in the first stage of a two-tier queuing system, and explore the trade-off it causes between their productivity and second stage wait times. Specifically, we focus on the behavior of batching admissions by emergency department (ED)...

Air pollution is known to negatively affect a range of health outcomes. Wildfire smoke is an increasingly important contributor to air pollution, yet extreme smoke events are highly salient and could induce behavioral responses that alter health impacts. We combine geolocated data covering the...