Effect of Affiliation with a Health System on the Performance of Critical Access Hospitals

• Activity Number: 473 - Advances in Measuring Health Care Quality and Disparities
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2018 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Maria DeYoreo*
• Companies: RAND Corporation

Abstract

We explore whether affiliating with a health system yields improved performance within Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs). Affiliating with a health system should provide CAHs with additional resources and greater quality improvement infrastructure, which we hypothesize will lead to better performance. We use the AHA annual survey data and CMS Hospital Compare data to identify health system affiliation, other hospital characteristics, and various performance measures, during years 2011-2016. We aim to explore the effect of switching into a health system by comparing performance measures from hospitals that switch at some point during 2011-2016 to those that do not switch into a health system.