Back

Does Physician Over-Service Improve the Quality of Care? A Standardised Patient Audit Study

Si, Y.; Bateman, H.; Chen, S.; Hanewald, K.; Li, B.; Su, M.; Zhou, Z.

2023-10-31 health economics
10.1101/2023.10.30.23297802 medRxiv
Show abstract

Physicians "know-do gaps" are a key factor driving the poor quality of healthcare in many developing countries, but there is little guidance on how to address these gaps. We designed a standardised patient audit study in China to evaluate the impact of physician over-service on their investment in learning and disease management decisions. We find that physicians total over-service leads to a 19.2%, 15.6% and 10.8% significant increase in consultation length, adherence to checklists, and patient-centred communication, respectively, but no significant improvement in giving a correct diagnosis, drug prescription or referral. The effects on physicians investment in learning are driven by over-service in drug prescription rather than over-service in medical tests. Moreover, over-service in drug prescription significantly leads to a 28.0 percentage-point increase in the prescription of a correct drug. Our findings imply that physician over-service reduces their "know-do gaps" and improves healthcare quality despite the related inefficient use of medical resources. JEL classificationD82; H75; I10; I11; I18; J45

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.