Background: Telemedicine has been incorporated into daily clinical practice. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the economic impact of electronic consultation as a means of referring patients between Primary Care (PC) services and the referral Cardiology Service (CS) of a tertiary hospital, in particular, the cost of reduced air pollution. Methods: The direct and indirect costs associated with all the interconsultations between PC and a CS of a tertiary hospital were analyzed under a universal single act model versus a prior e-consultation model that selected patients who would later attend the single-act consultation. The cost of pollution from private motor vehicle travel by road has been analyzed with a Cobb–Douglas cost function. Results: The total cost per patient, including the costs associated with death, represented a saving in the model with e-consultation of 25.6%. The economic value for the reduction of contamination would be EUR 12.86 per patient. Conclusions: The introduction of e-consultation in the outpatient management of patients referred from PC to a CS, helps to reduce direct and indirect costs for the patient and the Health Care System. The cost of pollution associated with the trips explains the total cost to a greater extent, except for the first face-to-face consultation.

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Waiting time for elective surgery is a key problem in the current medical world. This paper aims to reproduce, by a Monte Carlo simulation model, the relationship between hospital capacity, inpatient activity, and surgery waiting list size in teaching hospitals. Inpatient activity is simulated by fitting a Normal distribution to real inpatient activity data, and the effect of the number of beds on inpatient activity is modelled with a linear regression model. Analysis is performed with data of the University Multi-Hospital Complex of Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), by considering two scenarios regarding the elastiticity of demand with bed increase. If demand does not grow with an increase on bed capacity, small changes lead to drastic reductions in the waiting lists. However, if demand grows as bed capacity does, adding additional capacity merely makes waiting lists worse.

La relevancia de la empresa familiar en la economía mundial la ha llevado a ser objeto de estudio desde diversos ámbitos y perspectivas. Sin embargo, el papel que juega la empresa familiar en el sector sanitario privado apenas ha sido analizado. El objetivo de este trabajo de investigación se centra en el estudio de la evolución histórica de la empresa familiar en el ámbito de la sanidad privada, intentando conocer la variación de la contribución de la misma al sector durante el periodo 1995-2018. Con este propósito, se construye una base de datos con los hospitales privados existentes en España, clasificándolos en familiares y no familiares para los años 1995 y 2018, realizando un análisis de corte transversal. Se observa un nivel de supervivencia de las empresas familiares de casi un 60%. Se propone implementar la metodología del estudio de casos en investigación futuras.