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Does information on quality affect patients’ choice of health care provider?

Paulsson, Fredrik LU (2015) NEKN01 20151
Department of Economics
Abstract (Swedish)
A condition for patient choice in health care to promote quality is that patients act in accordance with information about quality and change to better care providers. In this paper I examine the relation between quality information and patient choice of care provider in the primary care of the county Scania in Sweden. As a natural experiment I use a quality-related award given to the best health care center in Scania. The award can be understood as an exogenous information shock. To estimate the effect from the award I reproduce the counterfactual situation with no information shock by using the synthetic control method. The results show that there is no significant effect from the information shock on the number of listed patients for... (More)
A condition for patient choice in health care to promote quality is that patients act in accordance with information about quality and change to better care providers. In this paper I examine the relation between quality information and patient choice of care provider in the primary care of the county Scania in Sweden. As a natural experiment I use a quality-related award given to the best health care center in Scania. The award can be understood as an exogenous information shock. To estimate the effect from the award I reproduce the counterfactual situation with no information shock by using the synthetic control method. The results show that there is no significant effect from the information shock on the number of listed patients for the award-winning care provider. Therefore improved availability of information on quality seems to have limited effect on patients’ choice of care provider. This suggests that the information-mechanism in the quasi-markets for primary care is not functioning properly, which implies that the incentives for care providers to improve quality are weak. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Paulsson, Fredrik LU
supervisor
organization
alternative title
A synthetic control study of the information mechanism in the Swedish quasi-market for primary care
course
NEKN01 20151
year
type
H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
subject
language
English
id
7793220
date added to LUP
2015-09-15 12:36:15
date last changed
2015-09-15 12:36:15
@misc{7793220,
  abstract     = {{A condition for patient choice in health care to promote quality is that patients act in accordance with information about quality and change to better care providers. In this paper I examine the relation between quality information and patient choice of care provider in the primary care of the county Scania in Sweden. As a natural experiment I use a quality-related award given to the best health care center in Scania. The award can be understood as an exogenous information shock. To estimate the effect from the award I reproduce the counterfactual situation with no information shock by using the synthetic control method. The results show that there is no significant effect from the information shock on the number of listed patients for the award-winning care provider. Therefore improved availability of information on quality seems to have limited effect on patients’ choice of care provider. This suggests that the information-mechanism in the quasi-markets for primary care is not functioning properly, which implies that the incentives for care providers to improve quality are weak.}},
  author       = {{Paulsson, Fredrik}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Does information on quality affect patients’ choice of health care provider?}},
  year         = {{2015}},
}