2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

A Quantitative Study of the Effect of Task Shifting on both Physician Shortage and Health Care Costs.

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22530240
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Applied economics
Research Institution	Sophia University
Principal Investigator	AOKI KEN 上智大学, 経済学部, 教授 (70275014)
Project Period (FY)	2010-10-20 – 2013-03-31
Keywords	医師の生産性 / 医師の不足 / 医療経済
Research Abstract	We empirically test a hypothesis that if the number of beds per physician (MD) is decreased, a physician's productivity raises and the number of discharge patients per MD increases. So, the constant number of MDs makes more discharged by reducing the number of beds. Our results are negative on the hypothesis. Our empirical study shows that by reducing the number of beds, in other words, by increasing intensity of MDs per bed, the average length of stay certainly gets shorter and the number of discharge patients per beds increases. However, the effect is not enough to increase the total number of discharged by compensating for decreased number of beds.

(3 results)