Seminar Vol. 206
Title: Does Gender Matter for Quality of Healthcare? A Standardized Patient Audit Study
Speaker: Xi Chen, Yale University
Time: December 11th, 2019 15:00-16:30
Venue: Conference Room 106B, IESR, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics)
About the speaker:
Xi Chen is an Assistant Professor of Public Health (Health Policy), of Global Health, of Economics, and of Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University. His areas of interest involve Health, Labor, Development Economics, and Applied Econometrics and Quantitative Methods. His research focuses on public policies related to health over the life cycle, population aging, climate change and health, and quality of life.
Chen is a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and its Cluster Lead in Environment and Human Capital in Developing Countries, President of the China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS), Butler-Williams Scholar at National Institute on Aging (NIA). His research projects funded by public and private funding sources has resulted in 60+ peer-reviewed publications, such as PNAS, LANCET, PLoS Medicine, LANCET Public Health, JEEM, EHP, SSM, JoEA, and AJAE.
Chen obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Cornell University.
Abstract:
Growing evidence suggests that female physicians tend to deliver higher quality health services than their male counterparts do. This study revisits the issue of gender disparities in health-care quality in a typical primary care setting via a well-designed randomized study. Using objective measures of clinical practice and outcomes, we also control for a rich set of provider characteristics, disease cases, time and clinic facility fixed effects. We find little differences by physician gender in the quality of health care. However, results show salient differences in quality of health care by patient gender, which is driven by a physician-patient gender match. Relative to female patients treated by female physicians, male patients treated by female physicians are prescribed more invasive or unnecessary tests during the visits but fewer unnecessary drugs afterwards. Compared to female physicians treating female patients, the rates of correct diagnosis and correct drug prescription are respectively 23·0% and 19·4% higher for female physicians treating male patients. Our evidence suggests more effective patient-centered communications between female physicians and male patients in comparison to other doctor-patient gender matches.
