Concentrating Emergency Rooms: Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish? An Empirical Research on Scale Economies and Chain Economies in Emergency Rooms in Dutch Hospitals

In this paper, we address the issue of whether it is economically advantageous to concentrate emergency rooms (ERs) in large hospitals. Besides identifying economies of scale of ERs, we also focus on chain economies. The latter term refers to the effects on a hospital's costs of ER patients who also need follow-up inpatient or outpatient hospital care. We show that, for each service examined, product-specific economies of scale prevail indicating that it would be beneficial for hospitals to increase ER services. However, this seems to be inconsistent with the overall diseconomies of scale for... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Blank, J.L.T. (Jos)
Hulst, B.L. (Bart) van
Valdmanis, V.G. (Vivian G.)
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
Schlagwörter: Chain economies / Cost function / Emergency rooms / Hospitals / Scale economies
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29035852
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : http://repub.eur.nl/pub/94314

In this paper, we address the issue of whether it is economically advantageous to concentrate emergency rooms (ERs) in large hospitals. Besides identifying economies of scale of ERs, we also focus on chain economies. The latter term refers to the effects on a hospital's costs of ER patients who also need follow-up inpatient or outpatient hospital care. We show that, for each service examined, product-specific economies of scale prevail indicating that it would be beneficial for hospitals to increase ER services. However, this seems to be inconsistent with the overall diseconomies of scale for the hospital as