EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures – What is the Role of Practice Styles?

Alexander Ahammer and Thomas Schober

No 2017-03, CDL Aging, Health, Labor working papers from The Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory Aging, Health, and the Labor Market, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: Variations in the use of medical resources, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. Whenever these variations cannot be explained by differences in patient needs or preferences, they may result in some individuals being over-treated, while others are under-treated, thus raising questions on the equity and efficiency of healthcare systems. One explanation for these variations is differences in medical practice styles; that is, physicians may develop their own treatment patterns based on their beliefs about the efficacy of medical interventions. We use a large administrative data set from Upper Austria to study the practice styles among primary care physicians. We decompose the use of healthcare services into patient characteristics, patient and physician fixed effects, and stochastic health shocks. Physician fixed effects are interpreted as a measure of practice styles, which are then related to observable physician characteristics and to attributes of the local healthcare sector.

Keywords: Health care expenditures; variation; practice styles; physician behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I11 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2017-05
Note: English
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://cdecon.jku.at/wp-content/uploads/wp1703.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles? (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures - What is the Role of Practice Styles? (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Exploring Variations in Healthcare Expenditures – What is the Role of Practice Styles? (2017) Downloads
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:jku:cdlwps:wp1703

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CDL Aging, Health, Labor working papers from The Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory Aging, Health, and the Labor Market, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by René Böheim (rene.boeheim@jku.at).

 
Page updated 2025-01-17
Handle: RePEc:jku:cdlwps:wp1703