I recently presented our paper, “Prescriber Influence on the Adoption of New Medicines: Evidence from Movers in Australia,” at the University of Auckland Department of Economics seminar.
The paper is joint work with Kadek Darmawan, Jonas Fooken, and Smriti Raichand at the Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, and is part of Kadek’s PhD thesis.
This was the first time we presented the paper with its initial set of results. I am very grateful to the department for their attendance and excellent feedback, which was extremely useful for the next iteration of the research and very encouraging overall.
A big thank you to my friend Diego Carrasco for hosting me in Auckland. Diego is also my PhD classmate and close friend. We spent four years sitting side by side staring at our computer screens through those long, dark COVID days. It was really special to reconnect in person.
About the Paper
We study how much doctors influence the adoption of newer medicines, focusing on anticoagulant treatment for patients with atrial fibrillation, a common condition that increases stroke risk. While warfarin was long the standard treatment, newer direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) offer practical advantages and have been subsidised in Australia since 2013.
To examine this, we use linked Australian administrative data and a movers design, exploiting patients who move across healthcare markets and are exposed to different prescribing environments. We implement this in a stacked event-study diff-in-diff to better isolate changes around moves and improve the transparency of the identifying variation.
We hope to share the paper and preliminary findings publicly soon, subject to data disclosure restrictions.
Kadek continues his PhD work on physician decision-making and medicine choice using rich Australian administrative data, with more results to come on how prescribing behaviour affects treatment choices and outcomes.
Stay tuned for more from this project and Kadek’s PhD work.