Background: Hospitals are increasingly pursuing specialization as a strategy to operate efficiently while delivering high-quality care. To date, however, evidence is lacking on whether hospital specialization has a consistent effect on patients' experience of care or whether different specialization characteristics influence how specialization works.
Purpose: This study investigates whether specialization characteristics, that is, the within-specialty concentration and the within-specialty urgency score, moderate the link between hospital specialization and patient experience of care.
Methodology: We use patient-reported and administrative data from German hospitals between 2014 and 2017, with orthopedic and trauma care as the research setting. Our sample consists of 157,458 patient observations nested within 483 hospitals. We apply random-intercept multilevel modeling.
Results: Our results indicate that the effect of specialization on patient experience of care (a) decreases as the within-specialty concentration increases and (b) increases as the within-specialty urgency score increases.
Conclusion: This study provides novel insights into the specialization characteristics that make hospital specialization in orthopedic and trauma care particularly effective at improving patient experiences.
Practice implications: Although specialization is gaining popularity as a strategy for pooling scarce resources and facilitating high-quality health care, hospital managers and policymakers should consider that certain characteristics of specialization can influence the way that specialization works and how effective it is in improving patient experiences. Within the scope of orthopedic and trauma care, our study suggests that a low concentration of diagnoses within a service area and a high average level of medical urgency make specialization particularly effective at improving patient experiences.
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