Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care

Pragya Kakani, Simone Matecna and Amitabh Chandra

No 33573, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Compared to similar patients, physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and other patients were largest for diagnoses that often require prescriptions, which physicians often self-prescribed. Our results suggest that improving access to legitimate prescriptions for acute symptoms, more than improving patient education, can reduce avoidable health care.

JEL-codes: I0 I10 I11 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33573.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:33573

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33573

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 ().