Hospitals and the generic versus brand‐name prescription decision in the outpatient sector
利用奥地利行政数据，发现住院经历显著降低患者门诊获得通用名药的概率，且效应大小受患者和医生特征影响，表明住院决策对门诊产生成本溢出。
Health care payers try to reduce costs by promoting the use of cheaper generic drugs. We show strong interrelations in drug prescriptions between the inpatient and outpatient sectors by using a large administrative dataset from Austria. Patients with prior hospital visits have a significantly lower probability of receiving a generic drug in the outpatient sector. The size of the effect depends on both the patient and doctor characteristics, which could be related to the differences in hospital treatment and heterogeneity in the physicians' adherence to hospital choices. Our results suggest that hospital decisions create spillover costs in health care systems with separate funding for inpatient and outpatient care.