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Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment
OBJECTIVE: By manipulating patients’ critical attitude in a video experiment, we examined whether physicians are more intended to perform defensive acts because of a higher perceived liability risk in Belgium. METHODS: We assigned 85 practicing gynaecologists/obstetricians and orthopaedists randomly...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10515032/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37737503 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13561-023-00458-3 |
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author | Daniels, Lotte Marneffe, Wim |
author_facet | Daniels, Lotte Marneffe, Wim |
author_sort | Daniels, Lotte |
collection | PubMed |
description | OBJECTIVE: By manipulating patients’ critical attitude in a video experiment, we examined whether physicians are more intended to perform defensive acts because of a higher perceived liability risk in Belgium. METHODS: We assigned 85 practicing gynaecologists/obstetricians and orthopaedists randomly to four hypothetical video consultations, in which the patients show either a critical attitude (i.e., getting ahead of the facts, showing distrust) or a non-critical attitude (i.e., displaying more neutral questions and expressions). We asked the physicians about the care they would administer in the presented cases and the expected likelihood that the patient would sue the physician in case of a medical incident. RESULTS: By manipulating patients’ verbal critical attitude (which indicates patients’ intention to take further steps), while keeping constant physician’s communication, patients’ clinical situation, preferences, and non-verbal behaviour in the videos, we were able to discover differential treatment styles driven by physicians’ perceived liability risk among patients with a different critical attitude. We found that physicians perform 17 percentage points more defensive acts (e.g., surgeries and diagnostic tests that are not medically necessary) when experiencing a high liability risk. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that patients’ critical attitude drives physicians’ perceived liability risk and consequent defensive behaviour among obstetricians/gynaecologists and orthopaedists. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13561-023-00458-3. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10515032 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Springer Berlin Heidelberg |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-105150322023-09-23 Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment Daniels, Lotte Marneffe, Wim Health Econ Rev Research OBJECTIVE: By manipulating patients’ critical attitude in a video experiment, we examined whether physicians are more intended to perform defensive acts because of a higher perceived liability risk in Belgium. METHODS: We assigned 85 practicing gynaecologists/obstetricians and orthopaedists randomly to four hypothetical video consultations, in which the patients show either a critical attitude (i.e., getting ahead of the facts, showing distrust) or a non-critical attitude (i.e., displaying more neutral questions and expressions). We asked the physicians about the care they would administer in the presented cases and the expected likelihood that the patient would sue the physician in case of a medical incident. RESULTS: By manipulating patients’ verbal critical attitude (which indicates patients’ intention to take further steps), while keeping constant physician’s communication, patients’ clinical situation, preferences, and non-verbal behaviour in the videos, we were able to discover differential treatment styles driven by physicians’ perceived liability risk among patients with a different critical attitude. We found that physicians perform 17 percentage points more defensive acts (e.g., surgeries and diagnostic tests that are not medically necessary) when experiencing a high liability risk. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that patients’ critical attitude drives physicians’ perceived liability risk and consequent defensive behaviour among obstetricians/gynaecologists and orthopaedists. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13561-023-00458-3. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023-09-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10515032/ /pubmed/37737503 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13561-023-00458-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Daniels, Lotte Marneffe, Wim Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title | Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title_full | Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title_fullStr | Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title_full_unstemmed | Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title_short | Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment |
title_sort | does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? evidence from a video experiment |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10515032/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37737503 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13561-023-00458-3 |
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