How robust are reference pricing studies on outpatient medical procedures? Three different preprocessing techniques applied to difference-in differences.

ABSTRACT: The evaluation of policies that are not randomly assigned on outcomes generated by nonlinear data generating processes often requires modeling assumptions for which there is little theoretical guidance. This paper revisits previously published difference-in-differences results of an important example, the introduction of reference pricing to common outpatient procedures, to assess the robustness of the estimated impacts by using different matching, and reweighting techniques to preprocess the data. These techniques improve covariate balance and reduce model dependence. Specifically, we examine the robustness of the effect of reference pricing on patient site-of-care choice, total expenditures, and complication rates. We apply three preprocessing methods: propensity score reweighting, exact

SUBMITTER: Brown TT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10801812 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature