TY  - JOUR
AU  - Goldman,Dana
AU  - Romley,John A.
TI  - Hospitals As Hotels: The Role of Patient Amenities in Hospital Demand
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14619
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14619
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14619.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Dana Goldman
Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics
University of Southern California
 3335 S. Figueroa St, Unit A
 Los Angeles, CA 90089-7273
Tel: (213) 821-7948
Fax: (213) 740-3460
E-Mail: dana.goldman@usc.edu

John Romley
RAND Corporation
1776 Main Street
P.O. Box 2138
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
E-Mail: romley@healthpolicy.usc.edu
AB  - Amenities such as good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings may play an important role in hospital demand. We use a marketing survey to measure amenities at hospitals in greater Los Angeles and analyze the choice behavior of Medicare pneumonia patients in this market. We find that the mean valuation of amenities is positive and substantial. From the patient perspective, hospital quality therefore embodies amenities as well as clinical quality. We also find that a one-standard-deviation increase in amenities raises a hospital's demand by 38.4% on average, whereas demand is substantially less responsive to clinical quality as measured by pneumonia mortality. These findings imply that hospitals may have an incentive to compete in amenities, with potentially important implications for welfare.
ER  -