Relocating? Keep costs down and efficiency high.

This paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition under which increased health care productivity must lead to decreased (increased) demand for health care as long as the demand for health care is inelastic (elastic). It is shown that this condition identifies a class of health production functions, which may provide useful guidance to empirical studies that depend wholly or partly on the correct specification of a health production function. As an illustration, it is demonstrated that this class of production functions may be useful for empirical studies that test the hypothesis that schooling, increasing the efficiency of health production, leads to a larger health output from a given set of health inputs. The paper also offers broader classes of production functions that would enable one to test this relationship between the demand elasticity and the effect of health care productivity on health care demand.

Efficiency↗

PubMed2004

Multi-detector computed tomography and 3-dimensional imaging in a multi-vendor picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) environment.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: To show the impact of the introduction of multi-detector computed tomography (CT) on radiologic workflow and to demonstrate how this reflects on picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) requirements. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Production measurements were obtained from different CT scanners (first two single-slice CT scanners; from December 2001 single and 4-slice CT; from April 2002 single and 16-slice CT) in number of patients from the radiologic information system. Implications on our PACS were recorded in terms of images and studies stored. Furthermore, our PACS design was made so that optimal use of 3-dimensional imaging within the radiologic workflow was possible. Finally, the number of non-diagnosed studies were recorded every day since the start of the transition to a filmless radiology department. RESULTS: This PACS design achieved a high level of integration between simple viewing and advanced 3-dimensional imaging and is optimized for handling large amounts of data. Overall increase of patients scanned with CT from January 2002-December 2003 was 54%. The number of series increased by 286% from December 2001-April 2003 and by 130% from April 2002-December 2003. From January 2002-February 2003, the number of images per patient increased from 175 to 450 (157%). Non-diagnosed studies decreased from about 100-120 before to practically zero after PACS implementation. CONCLUSION: PACS significantly increases productivity because of availability of the images and elimination of certain manual tasks. These results show that although the amount of examinations increases significantly with the introduction of MDCT, simultaneous introduction of PACS and filmless operation allows radiologists to handle the growth in workload.

Efficiency↗