Why do patients bypass the nearest hospital?
Author InfoMarco Varkevisser Stéphanie van der Geest Abstract Using individual patient level hospital utilisation data for 2003, we examine the decisions of Dutch patients to bypass the nearest hospital for orthopaedics and neurosurgery. During our sample period, health insurers did not steer patients to preferred hospitals and performance indicators were only scarcely available. Nevertheless, both for orthopaedics care (38%) and neurosurgery (54%) numerous patients did not visit the nearest hospital. From the estimation results of our logit model it follows that extra travel time negatively influences the probability of hospital bypassing. Good waiting time performance by the nearest hospital also significantly decreases the likelihood of a bypass decision. Patients seem to place a lower negative value on extra travel time for orthopaedics care than for neurosurgery. The valuation of shorter waiting time also varies between these two types of hospital care. A good performance of the n
