Drug compliance, co‐payment and health outcomes: evidence from a panel of Italian patients

Vincenzo Atella, Franco Peracchi, Domenico Depalo and Claudio Rossetti

Health Economics, 2006, vol. 15, issue 9, 875-892

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes – hospitalization and mortality rates – using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health care services until they either die or leave the local health authority. We adopt a disease specific approach, concentrating on hypertensive patients treated with ACE‐inhibitors. Our results show that medical compliance has a clear effect on both hospitalization and mortality rates: health outcomes clearly improve when patients become more compliant to drug therapy. At the same time, we are able to infer valuable information on the role that drug co‐payment can have on compliance, and as a consequence on health outcomes, by exploiting the presence of two natural experiments during the period of analysis. Our results show that drug co‐payment has a strong effect on compliance, and that this effect is immediate. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.1135

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:wly:hlthec:v:15:y:2006:i:9:p:875-892

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().