TY  - JOUR
AU  - Currie, Janet
AU  - MacLeod, W. Bentley
AU  - Van Parys, Jessica
TI  - Physician Practice Style and Patient Health Outcomes: The Case of Heart Attacks
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21218
PY  - 2015
Y2  - May 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21218
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21218
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21218.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Janet Currie
Department of Economics
Center for Health and Wellbeing
185A Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-7393
E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu

W. Bentley MacLeod
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 West 118th Street, MC 3308
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 310-571-5083
Fax: 212/854-4782
E-Mail: wbmacleod@wbmacleod.net

Jessica N. Van Parys
Department of Economics
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue, HW 1534
New York, NY 10065
E-Mail: jessica.vanparys@hunter.cuny.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -