Journal
JOURNAL OF HEALTH ECONOMICS
Volume 47, Issue -, Pages 64-80Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.01.013
Keywords
Heart attack; Provider practice style; Responsiveness; Aggressiveness
Ask authors/readers for more resources
When a patient arrives at the Emergency Room with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the provider on duty must quickly decide how aggressively the patient should be treated. Using Florida data on all such patients from 1992 to 2014, we decompose practice style into two components: The provider's probability of conducting invasive procedures on the average patient (which we characterize as aggressiveness), and the responsiveness of the choice of procedure to the patient's characteristics. We show that within hospitals and years, patients with more aggressive providers have consistently higher costs and better outcomes. Since all patients benefit from higher utilization of invasive procedures, targeting procedure use to the most appropriate patients benefits these patients at the expense of the less appropriate patients. We also find that the most aggressive and responsive physicians are young, male, and trained in top 20 schools. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available