Variations in physician activity and general practice patterns

Sophie Béjean, Christine Peyron and Renaud Urbinelli
Additional contact information
Christine Peyron: LEG - CNRS UMR 5118 - Université de Bourgogne

No 2006-01, LEG - Document de travail - Economie from LEG, Laboratoire d'Economie et de Gestion, CNRS, Université de Bourgogne

Abstract: The objective of this study is to identify the practice profiles of different GPs in order to test the hypothesis of heterogeneity in physician behaviour. We have established an extensive database consisting of about 4 700 GPs from two regions in France (Aquitaine and Burgundy) for the year 2000. Variables describe the volume as well as the structure of the physicians' medical activity, income level, personal characteristics, practice characteristics, socioeconomic and geographical environment. We used two complementary methods to test the heterogeneity of the behaviour of private physicians: a cluster analysis to identify different practice profiles and econometric tests to display the determinants of the physicians' multidimensional activity. Our results show that four different homogeneous groups can be identified, each one associating a physician's level of activity to his socioeconomic status. Econometric tests clearly distinguish the main determinants between the multidimensional medical activity of rural and urban GPs. We conclude with the finding that there is no uniformity in the way GPs practice medicine. The level and type of medical activity vary greatly among physicians mainly due to the characteristics of the socioeconomic environment and other individual factors. An immediate consequence is that any cost-containment measure, such as regulating fees, which applies uniformly to all GPs, inevitably results in different outcomes according to the physicians' category type.

Keywords: medical activity; practice profiles; general practitioner; cluster analysis; econometric test (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2006-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:lat:legeco:2006-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LEG - Document de travail - Economie from LEG, Laboratoire d'Economie et de Gestion, CNRS, Université de Bourgogne Pôle d'Economie et de Gestion - 2, bd Gabriel - BP 26611 - F-21066 Dijon cedex - France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().