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Exploring variations in health-care expenditures-What is the role of practice styles?


ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Ahammer A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7187477 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Exploring variations in health-care expenditures-What is the role of practice styles?

Ahammer Alexander A   Schober Thomas T  

Health economics 20200220 6


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  ...[more]

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