I recently presented our paper, “Prescriber Influence on the Adoption of New Medicines: Evidence from Movers in Australia,” at the Department of Economics, University of Technology Sydney.
The paper is joint work with Kadek Darmawan, Jonas Fooken, and Smriti Raichand at the Macquarie University Centre for Health Economy, and is part of Kadek’s PhD thesis.
Many thanks to the Department of Economics for the invitation, and in particular to Ali Vergili for hosting me. I received very nice feedback from everyone about the empirical design and potential extensions, as well as ideas for new papers :)
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.
