TY  - JOUR
AU  - Athey, Susan
AU  - Stern, Scott
TI  - The Adoption and Impact of Advanced Emergency Response Services
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6595
PY  - 1998
Y2  - June 1998
DO  - 10.3386/w6595
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6595
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6595.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Susan Athey
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/725-8696
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: athey@stanford.edu

Scott Stern
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-476
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/253-3053
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: sstern@mit.edu
M1  - published as Susan Athey, Scott Stern. "The Adoption and Impact of Advanced Emergency Response Services," in David M. Cutler, editor, "The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions" University of Chicago Press (2000)

AB  - This paper studies the causes and consequences of the adoption of technology by hospitals  and public emergency response systems, focusing on Basic and Enhanced 911 services.  Basic 911 allows people within a given locality to access specialized call-takers and ambulance dispatchers using the single telephone number 911. Enhanced 911 is characterized by telecommunications equipment and information technology which identifies the location of emergency callers.  We begin by exploring the distribution of 911 systems among counties in the U.S., showing that this locally provided service responds to income and political factors as well as population and density of a county.  Then, using a database of cardiac patients in Pennsylvania in 1995, we are able to characterize some of the productivity efforts of 911 services. We show that Enhanced 911 reduces response times, which in turn reduce mortality.  Further, we find that the pre-hospital system interacts with the allocation of patients to hospitals in several ways.  First, patient severity affect the allocation of patients to high-technology hospitals.  Second, conditional on the availability of advanced cardiac care facilities, counties with 911 systems allocate cardiac patients to hospitals with better technology.  Finally, hospitals with more advanced emergency and cardiac technology treat a higher share of cardiac patients who make use of the pre- hospital system.
ER  -