Team formation and performance: evidence from healthcare referral networks
Date
2022-05
Authors
Agha, Leila
Ericson, Keith M. Marzilli
Geissler, Kimberley
Rebitzer, James B.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
L. Agha, K.M.M. Ericson, K. Geissler, J.B. Rebitzer. 2022. "Team Formation and Performance: Evidence from Healthcare Referral Networks" Management Science, Volume 68, Issue 5, pp.3175-3973. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4091
Abstract
We examine the teams that emerge when a primary care physician (PCP) refers patients to specialists. When PCPs concentrate their specialist referrals — for instance, sending their cardiology patients to fewer distinct cardiologists — this encourages repeat interactions between PCPs and specialists. Repeated interactions provide more opportunities and incentives to develop productive team relationships. Using data from the Massachusetts All Payer Claims Database, we construct a new measure of PCP team referral concentration and document that it varies widely across PCPs, even among PCPs in the same organization. Chronically ill patients treated by PCPs with 1 standard deviation higher team referral concentration have 4% lower health care utilization on average, with no discernible reduction in quality. We corroborate this finding using a national sample of Medicare claims, and show that it holds under various identification strategies that account for observed and unobserved patient and physician characteristics. The results suggest that repeated PCP-specialist interactions improve team performance.
Description
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You are free to download this work and share with others, but cannot change in any way or use commercially without permission, and you must attribute this work as “Management Science. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021. 4091, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.”