Influence of non-price competition among hospitals on health care delivery system

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Under the fee for service reimbursement system of health care in apan, hospitals have to compete with each other in order to attract more patients. Because fee for each service is universally determined by the government, they seem to have non-price competition. We hypothesized that hospitals adopted new technologies such as CTs and MRIs to demonstrate their quality so that they could attract more patients. We used data of hospitals under 200 beds. We picked up several second medical care areas defined by prefectures. We performed multiple regression analyzes to investigate relationship between the number of outpatients and medical equipments, human resources and hospital characteristics. Some equipments such as MRIs and fiberscopies showed positive influence to increase the number of outpatients.