TRULY INEFFICIENT OR PROVIDING BETTER QUALITY OF CARE? ANALYSING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RISK-ADJUSTED HOSPITAL COSTS AND PATIENTS' HEALTH OUTCOMES

Observed variation in hospital costs may be attributable to differences in patients' health outcomes. Previous studies have resorted to inherently incomplete outcome measures such as mortality or re‐admission rates to assess this claim. This study makes use of a novel dataset of routinely collected patient‐reported outcome measures (PROMs) linked to inpatient records to (i) access the degree to which cost variation is associated with variation...