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Does Your Doctor Matter? Doctor Quality and Patient Outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Rita Ginja

    (University of Bergen)

  • Julie Riise

    (University of Bergen)

  • Barton Willage

    (University of Colorado--Denver)

  • Alexander Willén

    (Norwegian School of Economics, CESifo, and UCLS)

Abstract
We estimate doctor value-added and provide evidence on the distribution of physician quality in an entire country, combining rich population-wide register data with random assignment of patients to general practitioners (GPs). We show that there is substantial variation in the quality of physicians, as measured by patients' post-assignment mortality, in the primary care sector. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in doctor quality is associated with a 12.2-percentage point decline in a patient's two-year mortality risk. While we find evidence of observable doctor characteristics and practice styles influencing a GP's value-added, a standard decomposition exercise reveals that most of the quality variation is driven by unobserved differences across doctors. Finally, we show that patients are unable to identify who the high-quality doctors are, and that patient-generated GP ratings are uncorrelated with GP value-added. Using a lower bound of the predicted value of an additional life year in Norway ($35,000), our results demonstrate that replacing the worst performing GPs (bottom 5 percent of the VA distribution) with GPs of average quality generates a social benefit of $27,417 per patient, $9.05 million per GP, or $934 million in total. At the same time, our results show that higher-quality GPs are associated with a lower per-patient cost.

Suggested Citation

  • Rita Ginja & Julie Riise & Barton Willage & Alexander Willén, 2022. "Does Your Doctor Matter? Doctor Quality and Patient Outcomes," Working Papers 2022-016, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2022-016
    Note: ECI, M
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Ida Lykke Kristiansen & Sophie Yanying Sheng, 2022. "Doctor Who? The Effect of Physician-Patient Match on The SES-Health Gradient," CEBI working paper series 22-05, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
    2. Willén, Alexander & Willage, Barton & Riise, Julie, 2022. "Employment Protection and Child Development," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 19/2022, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    value-added; health behaviors; mortality rate;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H75 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Government: Health, Education, and Welfare
    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy

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