“…Therefore, up to 10 control hospitals were allocated in ranking order to each FIT hospital based on a priori defined knockout criteria (i.e., same region, institutionalized structures, such as specialist departments, and PIA), criteria based on patients (i.e., number of cases per diagnosis) with a weighting of 50%, structural features of hospitals (e.g., number of beds or number of personnel) with a weighting of 25%, and regional factors (e.g., unemployment rate, household income) with a weighting of 25%. More details can be found in the already-published study protocol (33). Once we identified best-fitting control hospitals for each FIT hospital, we applied a second matching algorithm on the level of patients.…”