The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a "residential history file" (RHF), using an algorithm that links Medicare claims and NH MDS assessments that results in a dataset (the RHF) which tracks the timing and location of health service use.
We examine the sensitivity and specificity of the RHF (as the test) in identifying part B claims in the NH (assumed as the gold standard).
The goal of the RHF is to create a per-person chronological history of health service utilization and location of care within a prespecified calendar (e.g., throughout a calendar year).
For example, admission assessments are required within 2 weeks of admission; therefore, the RHF fills up to 14 days back during consecutive "gap" days to form an NH stay.
Death is recorded as occurring on the last RHF episodelet, thus enabling an easy identification of place of death.
For instance, in case of doctors in RHFs, the estimated parameter value of 1.47 in Table 2 represent the doctors' supply elasticity with respect to wage rates.
Table 3 reports the estimated parameter values for health output (patients treated) production functions of both RHFs and UHFs.
Based on the estimated supply and output elasticities from Tables 2 and 3, respectively, and exogenously given profile for total cost and total stock of registered health professionals, we can now directly compute the optimal expansion paths for inputs, and output for both UHFs and RHFs using the reduced form expressions derived from the optimisation problem.
* In terms of health personnel, the optimisation model predicted a faster growth for doctors in RHFs during the entire plan period (about 11.1 percent p.a.), which is to be induced by raising their salaries by a substantial amount particularly in the earlier years (over 15 percent in 1993) as shown in Table 5.
Our optimisation model predicts recurring outlays of over 5 and 2.5 times that of development expenditures for UHFs and RHFs, respectively, in 1992-93.