Abstract
The aim of the study was to examine whether improved quality of primary physician services, measured by patient satisfaction, leads to fewer admissions to somatic hospitals. We studied differences in hospital admissions at the municipality level in Norway. In addition to the standard explanatory variables for use of hospitals—gender, age, socio-economic status and travelling distance to the nearest hospital—we also included a measure of patient satisfaction with primary physician services in the municipality. Data on patient satisfaction was obtained from an extensive questionnaire survey of 63,798 respondents. We found a statistically significant negative relationship between patient satisfaction and the number of hospital admissions. This conclusion was robust with regard to the empirical specification, and the effect was large.
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Notes
Spending on overnight hospital patients constitutes approximately 95% of total hospital spending on inpatient treatment. Information on resources used by hospitals on outpatient treatment does not exist.
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Acknowledgments
Two referees provided useful comments. We wish to thank May-Britt Aronsen, who prepared the data from the Norwegian Patient Register. We also wish to thank Arve Sjølingstad at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, who prepared the data from the Surveys of 40-year-olds. We also thank Linda Grytten for translating the Norwegian manuscript to English. Data for some of the explanatory variables we used were obtained from Statistics Norway and Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Neither Statistics Norway nor Norwegian Social Science Data Services are responsible for the analyses that are presented in this paper.
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Carlsen, F., Grytten, J., Kjelvik, J. et al. Better primary physician services lead to fewer hospital admissions. Eur J Health Econ 8, 17–24 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-006-0001-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-006-0001-x