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Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles?
Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7187477/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32077571 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hec.4011 |
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author | Ahammer, Alexander Schober, Thomas |
author_facet | Ahammer, Alexander Schober, Thomas |
author_sort | Ahammer, Alexander |
collection | PubMed |
description | Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different health‐care services and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients' health states. We find that, although GPs explain only a small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of € 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high‐ and low‐spending GPs. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7187477 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-71874772020-04-29 Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? Ahammer, Alexander Schober, Thomas Health Econ Research Articles Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different health‐care services and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients' health states. We find that, although GPs explain only a small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of € 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high‐ and low‐spending GPs. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2020-02-20 2020-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7187477/ /pubmed/32077571 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hec.4011 Text en © 2020 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Ahammer, Alexander Schober, Thomas Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title | Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title_full | Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title_fullStr | Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title_full_unstemmed | Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title_short | Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? |
title_sort | exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—what is the role of practice styles? |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7187477/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32077571 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hec.4011 |
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