How Private Nonprofit Hospitals Differ from Private For-Profit Hospitals in Average Inpatient Length of Stay?
Jomon A. Paul and Huan Ni
Coles Working Paper Series, FALL19-04, November 2019
Overview Inpatient length of stay (LOS) could serve as a measure of a variety of healthcare features, such as accessibility, cost, and quality. With the accelerating increase in healthcare costs and need to improve quality, the factors that may affect LOS must be understood. We use a national dataset to empirically investigate whether the type of hospital ownership (nonprofit vs for-profit) is associated with LOS. Our results show that stays at nonprofit hospitals are likely to be longer, and this result holds after we model LOS and inpatient readmission rate jointly. The simultaneous equation model indicates a negative relation between LOS and readmission, which indicates a longer LOS may lead to a better health outcome. Our work also indicates that when we study LOS empirically, hospital ownership should be treated as endogenous; otherwise, the estimates of the relation between LOS and hospital ownership are biased.
36 | Working Papers
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