Room: Upson 215
Time: Mon 08:30 AM-10:00 AM

Determinants of Physician Prescribing Decisions

Chair: Becky Briesacher

Session Description

As the proverbial captains of the medical team, physicians are in charge of directing a substantial portion of medical care resources and have much discretion in deciding how to allocate them. Policies intended to alter physician behavior (e.g., to improve the efficiency of the health care system) need to be grounded in an understanding of the determinants of physician behavior. Prior studies on these topics have been hampered by significant data constraints. This session features recent empirical research investigating the role and importance of information sources and incentives physicians face in choosing prescription drug therapies for their patients. The paper by Chou examines the extent that physicians learn from their peers in selecting antipsychotic medications using a rich, longitudinal dataset from Taiwan tracking physicians and their patients over eights years. The paper by Epstein uses novel data from a web-based experiment combined with administrative data to quantify the simultaneous effects of insurer drug formulary constraints (including prior authorization requirements that are costly to physicians and explicit patient co-payments) and pharmaceutical marketing efforts (including recent detailing and the availability of free samples) on physician prescribing recommendations. The paper by Huskamp looks at patterns of prescribing for antipsychotics among a large panel of U.S. physicians to explore the extent of and variation in drug choice concentration. To help put these papers in perspective, the session proposal includes discussants who are experts in physician behavior and pharmaceutical drug use.

Key Terms None Listed

Session Organizer: Andrew Epstein (Yale University)

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Presentations

1. Do Physician Peer Effects Exist? Evidence from New Drug Prescriptions

   Presenter: Shin-Yi Chou (Lehigh University)

   Discussant: J. Niels Rosenquist (Harvard University)

2. Push vs. Pull: The Influence of Pharmaceutical Marketing and Formularies on Physicians’ Prescribing Decisions

   Presenter: Andrew Epstein (Yale University)

   Discussant: Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University)

3. Physician Prescribing Patterns for Psychiatric Medications

   Presenter: Haiden Huskamp (Harvard University)

   Discussant: Marisa Domino (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)