and self-care as imperfect substitutes. It is assumed that specific knowledge increases the self-diagnosis competence …

This paper investigates the consequences that patients face when their regular primary care provider closes down her … practice, typically due to retirement. We estimate the causal impact of closures on patients' utilization patterns, medical … expenditures, hospitalizations, and health plan choice. Employing a difference-in-difference framework, we find that patients who …

information directly to patients on their purchasing-decisions regarding pharmaceutical drugs. We analyze the effect of … substitution probability. Based on 540,000 drug purchases by 60,000 patients we find that the probability of switching to a generic … substantially depend on whether patients face a copayment for their drug purchase and thus personally financially benefit from …

We estimate the impact of nurse unions on health care quality using patient discharge data and the universe of hospital … hospital-specific trends, we find that unionized hospitals also outperform hospitals without any union election in the same 12 …

, I analyze the effect of 18 recent hospital closures in Germany on patients’ driving times and the probability to be … residents who live in areas where a hospital closed, showing that the closure seems to affect patients’ care. … Kosteneinsparungen betonen, haben die Patientinnen und Patienten zum Teil die Befürchtung, dass ihre Gesundheitsversorgung gefährdet ist …

In recent health care reforms, several countries have replaced pure payment schemes for physicians (fee …-for-service, capitation) by so-called mixed payment schemes. Until now it is still an unresolved issue whether patients are really better off … after these reforms. In this study we compare the effects resulting from pure and mixed incentives for physicians under …

satisfaction by communicating waits to patients.We conduct a field experiment at an urban ED. We develop a machine learning … patients with personalized estimated waits with no overestimation (the median), moderate overestimation (70th-percentile), or … high overestimation (90th-percentile). Patients report higher satisfaction when receiving their estimated waits, but the …

delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text … with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e., not surprising, casual …, or interactive). The best-performing intervention in our study reminded patients twice to get their flu shot at their …