@techreport{HuangUllrich, type = {Working Paper}, author = {Huang, Shan and Ullrich, Hannes}, title = {Provider effects in antibiotic prescribing: Evidence from physician exits}, series = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, journal = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, edition = {No. 18}, doi = {10.48462/opus4-4975}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-49755}, pages = {81}, abstract = {In the fight against antibiotic resistance, reducing antibiotic consumption while preserving healthcare quality presents a critical health policy challenge. We investigate the role of practice styles in patients' antibiotic intake using exogenous variation in patient-physician assignment. Practice style heterogeneity explains 49\% of the differences in overall antibiotic use and 83\% of the differences in second-line antibiotic use between primary care providers. We find no evidence that high prescribing is linked to better treatment quality or fewer adverse health outcomes. Policies improving physician decision-making, particularly among high-prescribers, may be effective in reducing antibiotic consumption while sustaining healthcare quality.}, language = {en} } @techreport{RibersUllrich, type = {Working Paper}, author = {Ribers, Michael Allan and Ullrich, Hannes}, title = {Machine learning and physician prescribing: a path to reduced antibiotic use}, series = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, journal = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, edition = {No. 19}, doi = {10.48462/opus4-4976}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-49769}, pages = {51}, abstract = {Inefficient human decisions are driven by biases and limited information. Health care is one leading example where machine learning is hoped to deliver efficiency gains. Antibiotic resistance constitutes a major challenge to health care systems due to human antibiotic overuse. We investigate how a policy leveraging the strengths of a machine learning algorithm and physicians can provide new opportunities to reduce antibiotic use. We focus on urinary tract infections in primary care, a leading cause for antibiotic use, where physicians often prescribe prior to attaining diagnostic certainty. Symptom assessment and rapid testing provide diagnostic information with limited accuracy, while laboratory testing can diagnose bacterial infections with considerable delay. Linking Danish administrative and laboratory data, we optimize policy rules which base initial prescription decisions on machine learning predictions and delegate decisions to physicians where these benefit most from private information at the point-of-care. The policy shows a potential to reduce antibiotic prescribing by 8.1 percent and overprescribing by 20.3 percent without assigning fewer prescriptions to patients with bacterial infections. We find human-algorithm complementarity is essential to achieve efficiency gains.}, language = {en} } @techreport{UllrichRibers, type = {Working Paper}, author = {Ullrich, Hannes and Ribers, Michael Allan}, title = {Machine predictions and human decisions with variation in payoffs and skill: the case of antibiotic prescribing}, series = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, journal = {Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers}, edition = {No. 27}, doi = {10.48462/opus4-5111}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-51112}, pages = {52}, abstract = {We analyze how machine learning predictions may improve antibiotic prescribing in the context of the global health policy challenge of increasing antibiotic resistance. Estimating a binary antibiotic treatment choice model, we find variation in the skill to diagnose bacterial urinary tract infections and in how general practitioners trade off the expected cost of resistance against antibiotic curative benefits. In counterfactual analyses we find that providing machine learning predictions of bacterial infections to physicians increases prescribing efficiency. However, to achieve the policy objective of reducing antibiotic prescribing, physicians must also be incentivized. Our results highlight the potential misalignment of social and heterogeneous individual objectives in utilizing machine learning for prediction policy problems.}, language = {en} }