Prescribing Behavior of General Practitioners for Generic Drugs

Berna Tuncay, Sergio Pagano, Mario De Santis and Pierpaolo Cavallo
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Berna Tuncay: Department of Economics, Koc University, 34450 Istanbul, Turkey
Sergio Pagano: Department of Physics, University of Salerno, 84084 Salerno, Italy
Mario De Santis: Consorzio Mega Ellas, 84132 Salerno, Italy
Pierpaolo Cavallo: Consorzio Mega Ellas, 84132 Salerno, Italy

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 16, 1-13

Abstract: The factors influencing General Practitioners’ (GPs) prescribing behavior are diverse in terms of health care policies and regulations, GPs’ education and experience, demographic trends and disease profiles. Thus, it can be useful to analyze the specific local patterns, as they affect the quality of healthcare and the stability of the healthcare market. The aim of the present longitudinal retrospective study is to investigate the prescription of generic drugs in a database of about 4.6 million prescriptions from a sample of 38 GPs practicing in Salerno, Italy, within a timeframe of 15 years, from 2001 to 2015. The GPs in our study show a general tendency to increase prescriptions of generic drugs during the studied time span, to fulfill regulatory obligations and with some differences in prescription behavior according to age, gender and experience. The generics prescription depends also on the different diagnoses, with some diagnostic areas showing a greater generic drug prescription rate. Expanding this research to larger datasets would allow deepening the knowledge of the patterns of GPs’ prescribing decisions, to provide evidence to be used in comparison between different national settings.

Keywords: generic drugs; general practitioner; prescribing behavior; electronic health records (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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