Publications
Publications
- 2025
Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Simone Matecna
Abstract
We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and other patients were largest for diagnoses commonly requiring prescriptions, which physicians often self-prescribed. Our results suggest that improving access to prescriptions for acute symptoms, more than improving patient education, may reduce avoidable health care.
Keywords
Citation
Chandra, Amitabh, Pragya Kakani, and Simone Matecna. "Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 33573, March 2025.