A Quantitative Study of the Effect of Task Shifting on both Physician Shortage and Health Care Costs.

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We empirically test a hypothesis that if the number of beds per physician (MD) is decreased, a physician's productivity raises and the number of discharge patients per MD increases. So, the constant number of MDs makes more discharged by reducing the number of beds.Our results are negative on the hypothesis.Our empirical study shows that by reducing the number of beds, in other words, by increasing intensity of MDs per bed, the average length of stay certainly gets shorter and the number of discharge patients per beds increases. However, the effect is not enough to increase the total number of discharged by compensating for decreased number of beds.