TY  - JOUR
AU  - Eggleston,Karen
AU  - Shen,Yu-Chu
AU  - Lau,Joseph
AU  - Schmid,Christopher H.
AU  - Chan,Jia
TI  - Hospital Ownership and Quality of Care: What Explains the Different Results?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12241
PY  - 2006
Y2  - May 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12241
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12241.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Karen Eggleston
Stanford University
Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
  
E-Mail: karene@stanford.edu

Yu-Chu Shen
Graduate School of Business and Public Policy
Naval Postgraduate School
555 Dyer Road
Monterey, CA 93943
Tel: 831/656-2951
E-Mail: yshen@nps.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-05-15
AB  - Does quality of care systematically differ among government-owned, private not-for-profit, and for-profit hospitals? A large empirical literature provides conflicting evidence. Through quantitative review of 46 studies since 1990, we find that several study features that can explain divergent results: analytic methods, disease studied, and data sources. For unprofitable care, how studies handle market competition and regional differences account for substantial variation. Policymakers should be aware that differences in results appear to arise predominantly from differences between studies%u2019 analytic methods. Moreover, conventional methods of meta-analytic synthesis should be applied with great caution given the considerable overlap among studied hospitals.
ER  -