Do Drug Price Adjustment Policies Work? The Impact of Physician Financial Incentive Plans on the Implementation of Drug
- PDF / 10,302,976 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 55 Downloads / 178 Views
H A R MA (0E (0N 0MICS
I89
Do Drug Price Adjustment Policies Work? The Impact of Physician Financial Incentive Plans on the Implementation of Drug Cost Containment Mechanisms
Hsuan-Lien Ckr, PhD Associate Professor, Department of Accounting. College of Commerce, National Taipei University, Taiwan. ROC Skuen-Zen Liu, PhD Professor, Department of Accounting. College of Management, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. ROC James C. Romeis, PhD Professor, Health Services Research, School o\ Public Health, Saint Louis University
Key Words Physician incentive program: Drug price adjustment policy: Hypertension Correspondence Address Dr. Hsuan-Lien Chu, Department of Accounting, College of Commerce, National Taipei University, 67. Sec. 3, Min-Sheng E. Road, Taipei, Taiwan (email: [email protected]).
In Taiwan, some hospitals reward physicians through financial incentive plans linked to the amount of revenue generated the drugs they prescribe to patients. This study investigates whether the prescription behavior of physicians impacts the implementation of the government’s drug price adjustment policy, which reduces the amount,ofreimbursement for certain drugs. Our objective is to determine if the policy is effective. To this end, we consider the drugs prescribed to a specificcategory of patients, nam@, hospital outpatients aged 65 and above with hypertension. Between December 1999 and July 2000, approximately 468,000 prescriptions were issued to such patients. First, we used regression analysis to examine the effectoffinancial incentives offered to physicians on drug utilization after the implementation of the drug price adjust-
INTRODUCTION Prescription drug expenditure in North America has nearly doubled in recent years, creating pressure for benefits managers and policymakers (1). For example, in Canada, total drug spending reached an estimated US $24.8 billion in 2005, up 11% from 2004 (2). Although various management strategies are used globally to address the problem of rising drug expenditure, the two major approaches are reference pricing and pharmacoeconomic guidelines (3). Seven major markets (the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and Japan) have different health care systems, but they adopt similar pricing and reimbursement policies to contain prescription drug costs. Generally, the management of drug reimbursement prices is complicated and controversial. Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI)
ment policy. Then, we employed a probit model to investigate changes in physicians’ prescriition behavior for drugs with and without reduced prices. The results show that hospitals with physician incentive programs have more drug treatment days and a higher number of drugs perprescription after implementation of a price adjustment policy. In addition, we found that drugs without reduced prices were presctibed more often than reduced-pricedrugs, which suggests that the financial incentives offered to physicians may have an impact on the implementation of drug cost containment mechanisms. Taiwa
Data Loading...
