Quantifying Productivity Growth in the Delivery of Important Episodes of Care Within the Medicare Program Using Insurance Claims and Administrative Data

We assess changes in multifactor productivity in delivering acute episodes of care (including services received after initial discharge from a hospital) for elderly Medicare beneficiaries over 2002-2014. For a majority of the eight episode types studied, productivity improved, exceeding an annualized growth rate of 1.0% in some cases. There is some evidence of negative productivity growth for heart failure episodes over this period. Our estimates reflect - and are meaningfully affected by the measurement of - trends in the quality of care, with patients experiencing improved outcomes for most episode types.