Cost efficiency, factor interchange, and technical progress in US specialized hospital pharmacies.
Specialized hospitals perform unique, technologically more complex, and relatively expensive medical procedures. Growing use of high-cost biotechnology drugs and increased clinical pharmacy tasks at these facilities have increased costs. This paper used a unique data set supplied by Eli Lilly, and a dual translog cost system to model the costs of specialized hospital pharmacy production. Results show that the potential substitution of pharmacy technicians for registered pharmacists and the decomposed technical change savings effects of expensive factors of production offer the greatest opportunities for containing costs. Slight diseconomies of scale were also observed.
Okunade
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Department of Economics, University of Memphis, TN 38152, USA. aokunade@cc.memphis.edu
Suraratdecha
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C
D003363:Cost Control; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational / Q000191:economics; D017721:Hospital Costs / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006782:Hospitals, Special / Q000191:economics*; D017059:Models, Econometric; D010607:Pharmacy Service, Hospital / Q000191:economics*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D014481:United States; D000078329:Workforce