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Ask Your Doctor or Pharmacist! On the Effect of Self-Dispensing Physicians on Pharmaceutical Coverage

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Abstract

In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the eects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because Switzerland's federalist legislation allows us to study self-dispensing and non-self-dispensing regimes alike. We add location information obtained from Google Geocoding services to our dataset in order to measure coverage based on distances. To capture a driver of long term positioning decisions, we take revenues as a proxy for a pharmacy's usage rate. We nd that, ceteris paribus, self-dispensation leads to a lowered regional density of pharmacies. By matching similar pharmacies across both regimes we nd that revenues are substantially lower for pharmacies under a self-dispensation regime. Pharmacies in cantons that allow physicians to dispense drugs tend to have relatively higher revenues associated with non-drugs. We suggest to organize legislation on self-dispensation at a ne grained regional level as regional typologies are the most reasonable justication for regime choice.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthias Bannert & David Iselin, 2015. "Ask Your Doctor or Pharmacist! On the Effect of Self-Dispensing Physicians on Pharmaceutical Coverage," KOF Working papers 15-387, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:15-387
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-010479991
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Rachamin, Yael & Meier, Rahel & Valeri, Fabio & Rosemann, Thomas & Muheim, Leander, 2021. "Physician-dispensing as a determinant of clinical and process measurements in patients at increased cardiovascular risk: A cross-sectional study in Swiss general practice," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 125(10), pages 1305-1310.

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    Keywords

    Pharmaceutical coverage; Drug dispensation; Self-dispensation; Health care expenditures; GIS; Propensity Score Matching;
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