ArticleMedical care2014
Quality of care and interhospital collaboration: a study of patient transfers in Italy.
Article in Medical care, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- Analysis of the patient-sharing network in hypertension management: a retrospective study in China.BMJ open · 2025Article
- A proposed method for identifying Interfacility transfers in Medicare claims data.Health services research · 2025Observational
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- A Conceptual Framework for Optimizing the Equity of Hospital-Based Emergency Care: The Structure of Hospital Transfer Networks.The Milbank quarterly · 2023Article
- Association of hospital centrality in inter-hospital patient-sharing networks with patient mortality and length of stay.PloS one · 2023Article
- Beyond patient-sharing: Comparing physician- and patient-induced networks.Health care management science · 2022Article
- Review of social networks of professionals in healthcare settings-where are we and what else is needed?Globalization and health · 2021Review
- Making sense of the French public hospital system: a network-based approach to hospital clustering using unsupervised learning methods.BMC health services research · 2021Article
- A network analysis of patient referrals in two district health systems in Tanzania.Health policy and planning · 2021Article
- The Effect of Interdependences of Referral Behaviors on the Quality of Ambulatory Care: Evidence from Taiwan.Risk management and healthcare policy · 2021Article
- The impact of sampling patients on measuring physician patient-sharing networks using Medicare data.Health services research · 2020Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesWe examine the dynamics of patient-sharing relations within an Italian regional community of 35 hospitals serving approximately 1,300,000 people. We test whether interorganizational relations provide individual patients access to higher quality providers of care. RESEARCH DESIGN AND
methodsWe reconstruct the complete temporal sequence of the 3461 consecutive interhospital patient-sharing events observed between each pair of hospitals in the community during 2005-2008. We distinguish between transfers occurring between and within different medical specialties. We estimate newly derived models for relational event sequences that allow us to control for the most common forms of network-like dependencies that are known to characterize collaborative relations between hospitals. We use 45-day risk-adjusted readmission rate as a proxy for hospital quality.
resultsAfter controls (eg, geographical distance, size, and the existence of prior collaborative relations), we find that patients flow from less to more capable hospitals. We show that this result holds for patient being shared both between as well as within medical specialties. Nonetheless there are strong and persistent other organizational and relational effects driving transfers.
conclusionsDecentralized patient-sharing decisions taken by the 35 hospitals give rise to a system of collaborative interorganizational arrangements that allow the patient to access hospitals delivering a higher quality of care. This result is relevant for health care policy because it suggests that collaborative relations between hospitals may produce desirable outcomes both for individual patients, and for regional health care systems.
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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.