02992cam a22004457a 4500 14032490 20250606220523.4 cr ||||||||||| 050711s2005 mau sb 000 0 eng 14032490 7 cbc orignew 4 ncip 20 y-gencompf undetermined NBER se02 2005-07-11 webcat se02 2005-07-11 se02 2005-07-11 LCAP batch update 2025-06-01-04:00: LCAPM-989 2005618405 DLC DLC HB1 Kessler, Daniel P. Can ranking hospitals on the basis of patients' travel distances improve quality of care? [electronic resource] / Daniel P. Kessler. Cambridge, MA : National Bureau of Economic Research, c2005. text txt rdacontent computer c rdamedia computer disc cd rdacarrier NBER working paper series ; working paper 11419 Title from PDF file as viewed on 7/11/2005. Includes bibliographical references. Unrestricted online access "Conventional outcomes report cardsƯ public disclosure of information about the patient-background-adjusted health outcomes of individual hospitals and physicians -- may help improve quality, but they may also encourage providers to "game" the system by avoiding sick and/or seeking healthy patients. In this paper, I propose an alternative approach: ranking hospitals on the basis of the travel distances of their Medicare patients. At least in theory, a distance report card could dominate conventional outcomes report cards: a distance report card might measure quality of care at least as well but suffer less from selection problems. I use data on elderly Medicare beneficiaries with heart attack and stroke from 1994 and 1999 to show that a distance report card would be both valid Ư that is, correlated with true quality Ư and able to distinguish confidently among hospitals Ư that is, able to reject at conventional significance levels the hypothesis that the true quality of a low-ranked hospital was the same as the quality of the average hospital. The hypothetical distance report card I propose compares favorably to (although does not necessarily dominate) the California AMI outcomes report card"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site. Also available in print. Mode of access: World Wide Web. System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Hospitals Evaluation. Medicare. Patients. Transportation. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ; working paper no. 11419. gdcebookspublic 2005618405 https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcebookspublic.2005618405 http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11419 gdc/scd