Cost efficiency, factor interchange, and technical progress in US specialized hospital pharmacies
利用礼来公司提供的独特数据集和双对数成本系统，研究了美国专科医院药房的生产成本，发现药剂师与药房技术员之间的替代以及昂贵生产要素的技术变革节约效应是控制成本的关键，同时存在轻微的规模不经济。
Specialized hospitals perform unique, technologically more complex, and relatively expensive medical procedures. Growing use of high-cost biotechnology drugs and increased clinical pharmacy tasks at these facilities have increased costs. This paper used a unique data set supplied by Eli Lilly, and a dual translog cost system to model the costs of specialized hospital pharmacy production. Results show that the potential substitution of pharmacy technicians for registered pharmacists and the decomposed technical change savings effects of expensive factors of production offer the greatest opportunities for containing costs. Slight diseconomies of scale were also observed.