中文摘要
我提供了关于医生在决定患者治疗效果中所起作用的新证据。我利用医院内心脏病发作患者被准随机分配给医生的机制,来估计个体医生的治疗效果。我估计,医生质量提高一个标准差可使一年期死亡率降低1.0个百分点(相当于平均死亡率的7%)。我还表明,若根据医生在治疗特定患者类型上的比较优势,在医院内重新分配医生与患者的匹配,死亡率可降低4%。这表明,重新配置现有医疗人员可以显著改善患者的治疗效果。
Abstract
I provide new evidence on the role doctors play in determining patient outcomes.I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of heart attack patients to doctors to estimate the effectiveness of individual doctors.I estimate a standard deviation increase in doctor quality reduces one-year mortality by 1.0 percentage points (7% of mean mortality).I show mortality could be reduced by 4% by reassigning doctors within hospitals to patients on the basis of their comparative advantage in treating specific patient types.This suggests reallocating existing staff could substantially improve patient outcomes.