ArticleHealth care management science2014
The relationship between hospital specialization and hospital efficiency: do different measures of specialization lead to different results?
Article in Health care management science, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hospital service focus vs. breadth: Impact on hospital outcomes and the moderating role of hospital size.Health care management science · 2026Article
- Determinants of quality in the independent and public hospital sectors in England.International journal for quality in health care : journal of the International Society for Quality in Health Care · 2025Article
- Multilevel Zero-One Inflated Beta Regression Model for the Analysis of the Relationship between Exogenous Health Variables and Technical Efficiency in the Spanish National Health System Hospitals.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Efficiency and Productivity Change of Public Hospitals in Panama: Do Management Schemes Matter?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Performance Evaluation of Combining with Medical and Old-Age Care in Pension Institutions of China: A Two-Stage Data Envelopment Analysis.Risk management and healthcare policy · 2021Article
- Investigating the link between medical urgency and hospital efficiency - Insights from the German hospital market.Health care management science · 2020Article
- Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Ownership Structure and Technical Efficiency Frontier in the Spanish National Health System Hospitals.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2020Article
- Road map for progress and attractiveness of Iranian hospitals by integrating self-organizing map and context-dependent DEA.Health care management science · 2019Article
- The use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in healthcare with a focus on hospitals.Health care management science · 2019Review
- Identifying congestion levels, sources and determinants on intensive care units: the Portuguese case.Health care management science · 2018Article
- Do private hospitals outperform public hospitals regarding efficiency, accessibility, and quality of care in the European Union? A literature review.The International journal of health planning and management · 2018Review
- Article
- Hospital Charges and Continuity of Care for Outpatients with Hypertension in South Korea: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study from 2002 to 2013.Korean journal of family medicine · 2017Article
- Comparing the Efficiency of Hospitals in Italy and Germany: Nonparametric Conditional Approach Based on Partial Frontier.Health care management science · 2017Article
- Health systems: changes in hospital efficiency and profitability.Health care management science · 2016Article
- Do Geographical Locations Affect in Hospitals Performance? A Multi-group Data Envelopment Analysis.Journal of medical systems · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This study investigated the relationship between hospital specialization and technical efficiency using different measures of specialization, including two novel approaches based on patient volumes rather than patient proportions. It was motivated by the observation that most studies to date have quantified hospital specialization using information about hospital patients grouped into different categories based on their diagnosis, and in doing so have used proportions-thus indirectly assuming that these categories are dependent on one other. In order to account for the diversification of organizations and the idea that hospitals can be specialized in terms of professional expertise or technical equipment within a given diagnosis category, we developed our two specialization measures based on patient volume in each category. Using a one-step stochastic frontier approach on randomly selected data from the annual reports of 1,239 acute care German hospitals for the years 2000 through 2010, we estimated the relationship of inefficiency to exogenous variables, such as specialization. The results show that specialization as quantified by our novel measures has effects on efficiency that are the opposite of those obtained using earlier measures of specialization. These results underscore the importance of always providing an exact definition of specialization when studying its effects. Additionally, a Monte Carlo simulation based on three scenarios is provided to facilitate the choice of a specialization measure for further analysis.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.