Title
Physician Workload and Hospital Reimbursement: Overworked Physicians Generate Less Revenue per Patient
Abstract
We study the impact of physician workload on hospital reimbursement utilizing a detailed data set from the trauma department of a major urban hospital. We find that the proportion of patients assigned a “high-severity” status for reimbursement purposes, which maps, on average, to a 47.8% higher payment for the hospital, is substantially reduced as the workload of the discharging physician increases. This effect persists after we control for a number of systematic differences in patient characteristics, condition, and time of discharge. Furthermore, we show that it is unlikely to be caused by selection bias or endogeneity in either discharge timing or allocation of discharges to physicians. We attribute this phenomenon to a workload-induced reduction in diligence of paperwork execution. We estimate the associated monetary loss to be approximately 1.1% (95% confidence interval, 0.4%--1.9%) of the department's annual revenue.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1287/msom.1120.0384
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Keywords
Field
DocType
hospital reimbursement,detailed data,trauma department,reimbursement purpose,confidence interval,annual revenue,discharge timing,physician workload,overworked physicians generate,discharging physician increase,major urban hospital,empirical
Revenue,Endogeneity,Economics,Actuarial science,Workload,Reimbursement,Confidence interval,Payment,Operations management,Selection bias,Diligence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
14
4
1523-4614
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.63
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Adam Powell1100.97
Sergei Savin233931.76
Nicos Savva3505.28