Despite heavy healthcare costs, the outcomes achieved are poor in the United States. As Medicare has become outcome-based reimbursement, hospitals are facing additional pressure to achieve better outcome measures and cut costs simultaneously. This can be achieved either through tradeoffs between cost and quality, or between outcomes and experiential quality simultaneously. There are two different types of quality in healthcare: Clinical quality, which relates to outcome measures such as readmission rate and mortality rate, and Experiential quality, which relates to how patients perceive the care they receive through Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) patient satisfaction surveys. The research work has tried to examine how hospitals trade off between experiential quality and cost and whether length of stay has a negative or a positive impact on experiential quality.
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