The influences of peers on outpatient physicians’ diagnostic scan decision-making

Wenxiang Sheng, Chengyuan Wang and Jun Li

Applied Economics, 2023, vol. 55, issue 47, 5504-5517

Abstract: Outpatient physicians’ diagnostic scan decision-making is not only related to the quality of medical diagnosis but also connected with the operations efficiency of the hospital. Identifying and understanding how outpatient physicians react to their peers in diagnostic scan decisions is an important economics issue that can help hospitals improve their operations effectiveness. Based on the data collected from a Chinese 3A Grade hospital, we reveal that peers have negative influences on outpatient physicians in deciding the number of scan orders during a shift. Relative to male physicians, female physicians are more likely to be influenced by their peers. Moreover, physicians in the surgical medicine departments are more sensitive to peers regarding decisions on scan orders, relative to those in the internal medicine departments. We further find that several conventional social interaction factors, including learning, status, and homophily, do not act on peer influence. While resource spillover caused by shared scan resource constraints, patient-volume and physician-volume can enlarge the negative peer influence, suggesting that resource spillover should be a significant driving force of the peer influence in deciding the number of scan orders. Finally, theoretical and management implications are discussed.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2022.2140109 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:55:y:2023:i:47:p:5504-5517

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2022.2140109

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().