Physicians’ Responses to Time Pressure: Experimental Evidence on Treatment Quality and Documentation Behaviour

Claudia Soucek, Tommaso Reggiani () and Nadja Kairies-Schwarz ()
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Claudia Soucek: Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf - Institute for Health Services Research and Health Economics, Moorenstr. 5, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany
Nadja Kairies-Schwarz: Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf - Institute for Health Services Research and Health Economics, Moorenstr. 5, 40225 Duesseldorf, Germany

MUNI ECON Working Papers from Masaryk University

Abstract: Background. In hospitals, decisions are often made under time pressure. There is, however, little evidence on how time pressure affects the quality of treatment and the documentation behavior of physicians. Setting. We implemented a controlled laboratory experiment with a healthcare framing in which international medical students in the Czech Republic treated patients in the role of hospital physicians. We varied the presence of time pressure and a documentation task. Results. We observed worse treatment quality when individuals were faced with a combination of a documentation task and time pressure. In line with the concept of the speed-accuracy trade-off, we showed that quality changes are likely driven by less accuracy. Finally, we showed that while documentation quality was relatively high overall, time pressure significantly lowered the latter leading to a higher hypothetical profit loss for the hospital. Conclusions. Our results suggest that policy reforms aimed at increasing staffing and promoting novel technologies that facilitate physicians' treatment decisions and support their documentation work in the hospital sector might be promising means of improving the treatment quality and reducing inefficiencies potentially caused by documentation errors.

Keywords: physician incentives; work motivation; time pressure; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 I11 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2025-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hea
Note: License: CC-BY 4.0
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mub:wpaper:2025-01

DOI: 10.5817/WP_MUNI_ECON_2025-01

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