El Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Chile tiene el agrado de invitar a usted a un nuevo Seminario Académico:

Título - Physician Practice Style and Healthcare Costs: Evidence from Emergency Departments 

Autores - Gautam Gowrisankaran (University of Arizona), Keith A. Joiner (University of Arizona), Pierre Thomas Léger (HEC Montreál, CIRANO an CIRPEE)

Presenta - Pierre Thomas L.

Abstract - We examine the impact of emergency department (ED) treatment on future healthcare costs and outcomes. We postulate that ED physicians may affect patient outcomes through acumen in diagnosis and appropriate disposition conditional on diagnosis. We make use of a unique dataset and quasi-experiment on patients who seek treatment at an ED in Montreal, Canada. Physicians there rotate across shifts between simple cases and difficult cases, implying that the assignment of patients will be quasi-random across physicians in an ED. We examine how the initial assignment of ED physician affects the use of resources during the initial ED visit and patient outcomes. We consider two serious, potentially life-threatening conditions, that present frequently in the ED, angina and transient ischemic attacks. We find that ED-costs (measured by physician-related costs and the number of procedures) and outcomes (from ED revisits to hospitalizations) vary across ED physicians practicing in the same ED. We also find a strong correlation of physician ”practice style” (defined by a physician’s average contribution to physician-related costs during the ED visit) across the two illness categories. Similarly, we find that physician ”skills” (measured in revisits to EDs and hospitalizations), or lack there of, correlate positively across patient populations. Our results also suggest that physicians associated with costly practice styles are not associated with better outcomes. Finally, we find that variations in diagnostic skills may be quantitatively more important than variations in disposition skills.

El  Seminario  se realizará el miércoles 13 de mayo de 13:00 a 14:00 hrs, en  la Sala P-307 Tercer Piso del edificio Placa de la Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile, ubicada en Diagonal Paraguay 257.