Description:
Long wait times are a problem for many budget-constrained public health care delivery systems around the world. We estimate the effectiveness of two supply levers on lowering wait times for new patients: 1) increasing clinician supply, and 2) increasing clinician productivity. We introduce new data on wait times for specialty care appointments at the 138 Veterans Health Administration medical centers in the U.S. between July 2014 and December 2019. We estimate a reduced-form model of wait times for an appointment using an instrumental variables approach. We find that a 10% increase in the sample average supply of specialists would reduce the wait time by 1.0 day (3.9% of the sample average). Increasing the rate at which specialists see new patients has a larger impact: a 10% increase in the number of new patients seen per clinic day would reduce the wait time by 3.2 days (12.9% of the sample average)