Primary Care Physician Practice Styles and Patient Care: Evidence from Physician Exits in Medicare

Itzik Fadlon and Jessica Van Parys

No 26269, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Primary care physicians (PCPs) provide frontline health care to patients in the U.S.; however, it is unclear how their practice styles affect patient care. In this paper, we estimate the long-lasting effects of PCP practice styles on patient health care utilization by focusing on Medicare patients affected by PCP relocations or retirements, which we refer to as "exits." Observing where patients receive care after these exits, we estimate event studies to compare patients who switch to PCPs with different practice style intensities. We find that PCPs have large effects on a range of aggregate utilization measures, including physician and outpatient spending and the number of diagnosed conditions. Moreover, we find that PCPs have large effects on the quality of care that patients receive, and that all of these effects persist for several years. Our results suggest that switching to higher-quality PCPs could significantly affect patients' longer-run health outcomes.

JEL-codes: I11 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Itzik Fadlon & Jessica Van Parys, 2020. "Primary care physician practice styles and patient care: Evidence from physician exits in Medicare," Journal of Health Economics, vol 71.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26269.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Primary care physician practice styles and patient care: Evidence from physician exits in Medicare (2020)
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:nbr:nberwo:26269

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26269

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().