Consumer Health Information and the Demand for Physician Visits
基于瑞士健康调查数据，用泊松障碍模型研究发现消费者健康信息越多，医生就诊次数越少，与以往文献结论相反，表明提升健康信息可能降低医疗支出。
The present study empirically investigates the effect of consumer health information on the demand for physician visits. Using a direct information measure based on questions from the Swiss Health Survey, we estimate a Poisson hurdle model for office visits. We find that information has a negative effect on health care utilization, contradicting previous findings in the literature. We consider differences in the used information measures to be the most likely explanation for the different findings. However, our results suggest that increasing consumer health information has the potential to reduce health care expenditures.