Building Physician Work Hour Regulations From First Principles and Best Evidence

Patient safety, work hour regulations, and resident education.

In this issue of Pediatrics, Drolet and coauthors report the opinions of pediatric residency program directors about the 2011 resident workhour restrictions 1 year after implementation: “Resident education, quality of life, continuity of patient care have worsened, with no improvements in numerous areas including fatigue, patient safety, and supervision.” Do these opinions simply represent resi...

Reputation & Regulations: Evidence from eBay∗

Asymmetric information potentially leads to adverse selection, market inefficiency, and market failure. To mitigate these problems, market designers rely on different policies. Some adopt reputation policies in which they certify high-quality users and help them signal their quality; others provide marketplace guarantee policies and, in the process, prevent low-quality users from participating....

Europe overhauls physician mobility regulations.

Changes in outcomes for internal medicine inpatients after work-hour regulations.

BACKGROUND Limits on resident work hours are intended to reduce fatigue-related errors, but may raise risk by increasing transfers of responsibility for patients. OBJECTIVE To examine changes in outcomes for internal medicine patients after the implementation of work-hour regulations. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING Urban, academic medical center. PATIENTS 14,260 consecutive ...

Measuring Physician Quality: Evidence from Physician Availability

Measuring physician quality is fundamental to understanding healthcare productivity, yet attempts to estimate the types of physicians that improve survival can be confounded due to patient sorting. This paper aims to overcome this endogeneity problem by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the mix of physicians available to treat the patient on the particlar date of an inpatient admissio...