Economic Analysis of Physician Assistants in Ontario: Literature Review and Feasibility Study

Amiram Gafni (), Stephen Birch () and Gioia Buckley
Additional contact information
Amiram Gafni: Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, McMaster University
Stephen Birch: Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, McMaster University

No 2011-03, Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis Working Paper Series from Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Abstract: We conducted a literature review of studies on Physician Assistants working in a variety of settings and found few evaluation studies on the costs and/or effectiveness of Physician Assistants in primary care practices, Emergency Departments and in hospital settings other than Emergency Departments. The existing literature is limited because of the non-Canadian settings in which most studies have been performed and because of the non-experimental study designs, which are subject to potential bias. In addition, the research questions that have been addressed have tended to ignore what would appear to be the most important comparison: that between Physician Assistants and other non-physician providers such as Nurse Practitioners. The evidence we found on the cost-effectiveness of PAs is anecdotal and difficult to translate in the Ontario context. We conclude that it is difficult to make use of the existing literature. We recommend that MOHLTC consider options for funding a randomized control trial that might involve several trial arms in the particular sectors of relevance to the PA program, for example: physician only; physician and PA; physician and NP; and physician, NP and PA. The purpose of this would be to explore the difference in costs and effects on the different service modalities. This would also provide sufficient information to support modelling the short-run effects that could be expected from allocating the same amount of resources to the different service modalities as well as the implications for physician resources planning.

Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chepa.org/docs/working-papers/chepa-wp-11-03.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hpa:wpaper:201103

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis Working Paper Series from Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis (CHEPA), McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lyn Sauberli ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).