Does advanced medical technology encourage hospitalist use and their direct employment by hospitals?
Author InfoGuy David (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA) Lorens A. Helmchen (School of Public Health and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA) Robert A. Henderson (School of Medicine, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA) Abstract In the United States, inpatient medical care increasingly encompasses the use of expensive medical technology and, at the same time, is coordinated and supervised more and more by a rapidly growing number of inpatient-dedicated physicians (hospitalists). In the production of inpatient care services, Hospitalist services can be viewed as complementary to sophisticated and expensive medical equipment in the provision of inpatient medical care. We investigate the causal relationship between a hospital’s access to three types of sophisticated diagnostic and therapeutic medical equipment – intensity-modulated radiation therapy, gamma knife, and multi-slice computed tomograph
