Physician Characteristics and Patient Survival: Evidence from Physician Availability

Joseph J. Doyle

No 27458, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Measuring physician quality is fundamental to understanding healthcare productivity, yet patient sorting can confound attempts to estimate the types of physicians that improve survival. This paper aims to overcome selection bias by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the mix of physicians available to treat patients when they are admitted to the hospital via the emergency department. One innovation is the construction of proxy measures for the types of physicians available using 100% Medicare claims data. Physician characteristics considered include specialty training, medical school quality rankings, sex, years of experience, and patient volume. The main finding is that when heart failure patients enter the hospital when more cardiologists are available, they are more likely to be treated directly by a cardiologist, have more invasive procedures, and survive over the following year.

JEL-codes: I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: AG EH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27458.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:27458

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27458

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().