Defensive medicine and strategic interactions in physician–patient networks

Sometimes physicians abandon high-risk procedures in favour of safer inferior treatments to reduce exposure to malpractice liability. This is called defensive medicine. It is known to increase healthcare costs besides having ethical implications. Network science has been used to reconstruct referral paths, connections between physicians from shared patients, and to investigate complex contagion in peer networks of physicians. We model physician-patient interactions as a bipartite network, study its evolution due to the agents’ strategic behaviour and physician selection process, and test how centrality affects convergence to a “virtuous state” where non-defensive physicians are majority.