1,720,964 research outputs found
Price Changes in Regulated Healthcare Markets: Do Public Hospitals Respond and How?
Get PDFThis paper examines the behaviour of public hospitals in response to the average payment
incentives created by price changes for patients classified in different Diagnosis Related
Groups (DRGs). Using panel data on public hospitals located within the Italian region of
Emilia-Romagna, we test whether a one-year increase in DRG prices induced public
hospitals to increase their volume of activity, and whether a potential response is associated
with changes in waiting times and/or length of stay. We find that public hospitals reacted to
the policy change by increasing the number of patients with surgical treatments. This effect
was smaller in the two years after the policy change than in later years, and for providers
with a lower excess capacity in the pre-policy period, whereas it did not vary significantly
across hospitals according to their degree of financial and administrative autonomy. For
patients with medical DRGs, instead, there appeared to be no effect on inpatient volumes.
Our estimates also suggest that an increase in DRG prices either decreased or had no impact
on the proportion of patients waiting more than six months. Finally, we find no evidence of
a significant effect on patients’ average length of stay
Quality in Nursing Homes
No full textIn developed countries, the role of public authorities as financing bodies and regulators of the long-term care sector is pervasive and calls for well-planned and informed policy actions. Poor quality in nursing homes has been a recurrent concern at least since the eighties and has triggered a heated policy and scholarly debate. The economic literature on nursing home quality has thoroughly investigated the impact of regulatory interventions and of market characteristics on an array of input-, process- and outcome-based quality measures. Most existing studies refer to the US context, even though important insights can be drawn also from the smaller set of works that covers European countries.
The major contribution to the empirical analysis of the nursing home industry is represented by the introduction of important methodological advances applying rigorous policy evaluation techniques with the purpose of properly identifying the causal effects of interest.
The use of up-to-date econometric methods that, in most cases, exploit policy shocks and longitudinal data has given researchers the possibility to achieve a causal identification of the impact of a wide range of policy initiatives, including the introduction of nurse staffing thresholds, price regulation, and public reporting of quality indicators. This has permitted to overcome part of the contradictory evidence highlighted by the strand of works based on more descriptive evidence. Possible lines for future research can be identified in further exploration of the consequences of policy interventions in terms of equity and accessibility to nursing home care
How do hospital-specialty characteristics influence health system responsiveness? An empirical evaluation of in-patient care in the Italian Region of Emilia-Romagna
Get PDFSeveral studies of health system responsiveness focus on the demand-side by investigating the association between socio-demographic characteristics of patients and their reported level of responsiveness. However, little is known about the influence of supply-side factors. This paper addresses that research gap by analysing the role of hospital-specialty characteristics in explaining variations in patients’ evaluation of responsiveness from a sample of about 38,700 in-patients treated in public hospitals within the Italian Region of Emilia-Romagna. The analysis is carried out by adopting a two-step procedure. First, we use patients’ self-reported data to derive five measures of responsiveness at the hospital-specialty level. By estimating a generalised ordered probit model, we are able to correct for variations in individual reporting behaviour due to the health status of patients and their experience of being in pain. Secondly, we run cross-sectional regressions in order to investigate the association between patients’ responsiveness and potential supply-side drivers, including waiting times, staff workload, the level of spending on non-clinical facilities, the level of spending on staff education and training, and the proportion of staff expenditure between nursing and administrative staff. Results suggest that responsiveness is to some extent influenced by the supply-side drivers considered
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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