Physician Practice Style and Patient Health Outcomes: The Case of Heart Attacks / Janet Currie, W. Bentley MacLeod, Jessica Van Parys.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Currie, Janet.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

MacLeod, W. Bentley.

Van Parys, Jessica.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21218.

NBER working paper series no. w21218

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Physician Practice Style and Patient Health Outcomes

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

When a patient arrives at the Emergency Room with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the provider on duty must quickly decide how aggressively the patient should be treated. Using Florida data on all such patients from 1992-2014, we decompose practice style into two components: The provider's probability of conducting invasive procedures on the average patient (which we characterize as aggressiveness), and the responsiveness of the choice of procedure to the patient's characteristics. We show that within hospitals and years, patients with more aggressive providers have consistently higher costs and better outcomes. Since all patients benefit from higher utilization of invasive procedures, targeting procedure use to the most appropriate patients benefits these patients at the expense of the less appropriate patients. We also find that the most aggressive and responsive physicians are young, male, and trained in top 20 schools.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2015.