Prospective Payment System Evaluation Studies-The Impact of Medicare's Prospective Payment System on Technology Diffusion

摘要

The paper explores the relationship between the Prospective Payment System (PPS) and the diffusion of complexity-expanding, support, and outpatient services; to see if PPS in its initial phase really discouraged the adoption of new services and technologies. If it did, one would be able to say a little more about how hospitals behave when actually faced with fixed or declining budgets. Slower adoption rates could also be indicative of a potential problem with prospective payment; namely, the suppression of beneficial technical change. Also addressed is the question of access to services in a limited way. Included are both descriptive and multivariate research. Descriptive trends indicate how much diffusion of complex versus outpatient services has occurred in the last few years while multivariate analysis is used to isolate PPS effects from other underlying causes.