Discussion paper

DP15105 "Does Higher Hospital Quality Save Lives? The Association between" "COVID-19 Deaths and Hospital Quality in the USA

This paper examines the association between the quality of hospitals to which residents of a US county are exposed and deaths from COVID-19. We derive a measure of the hospitals accessible to county residents based on ambulance travel patterns. We estimate hospital quality from measures of performance used in a flagship national pay-for-performance program. We find that a standard deviation in local quality-
exposure is associated with a roughly 9% lower death rate. The preventive effects of access to high quality hospitals vary sharply by minority composition of the local population.

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Citation

Kunz, J and C Propper (2020), ‘DP15105 "Does Higher Hospital Quality Save Lives? The Association between" "COVID-19 Deaths and Hospital Quality in the USA‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15105. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp15105