carolrmc
commented
1 year ago Maybe that’s why I’ve ended up with such a mouthful of dental work!!
On Tue, 10 Jan 2023 at 11:24, Nelson @.***> wrote:
Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment: https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/130/629/1346/5766223
Essentially: if you dentist is proposing a treatment there's a 1/3 chance you don't need it and they are cash-grabbing. 😕 Plenty of horror stories online of people with minor cavities ending up requiring root-canal treatment only to discover later that the minor cavities didn't need fillings and could instead have had more modern treatment & sealing. 😡 Abstract
Agency problems are a defining characteristic of healthcare markets. We present the results from a field experiment in the market for dental care: a test patient who does not need treatment is sent to 180 dentists to receive treatment recommendations.
In the experiment, we vary the socio-economic status of the patient and whether a second opinion signal is sent. Furthermore, measures of market, practice and dentist characteristics are collected. We observe an overtreatment recommendation rate of 28% and a striking heterogeneity in treatment recommendations. Furthermore, we find significantly fewer overtreatment recommendations for patients with higher socio-economic status compared with lower socio-economic status for standard visits, suggesting a complex role for patients’ socio-economic status. Competition intensity, measured by dentist density, does not have a significant influence on overtreatment. Dentists with shorter waiting times are more likely to propose unnecessary treatment.
via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34322194
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nelsonic
Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment: https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/130/629/1346/5766223
Essentially: if you dentist is proposing a treatment there's a 1/3 chance you don't need it and they are cash-grabbing. 😕 Plenty of horror stories online of people with minor cavities ending up requiring root-canal treatment only to discover later that the minor cavities didn't need fillings and could instead have had more modern treatment & sealing. 😡
Abstract
Agency problems are a defining characteristic of healthcare markets. We present the results from a field experiment in the market for dental care: a test patient who does not need treatment is sent to 180 dentists to receive treatment recommendations.
In the experiment, we vary the socio-economic status of the patient and whether a second opinion signal is sent. Furthermore, measures of market, practice and dentist characteristics are collected. We observe an overtreatment recommendation rate of 28% and a striking heterogeneity in treatment recommendations. Furthermore, we find significantly fewer overtreatment recommendations for patients with higher socio-economic status compared with lower socio-economic status for standard visits, suggesting a complex role for patients’ socio-economic status. Competition intensity, measured by dentist density, does not have a significant influence on overtreatment. Dentists with shorter waiting times are more likely to propose unnecessary treatment.
via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34322194