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.
Defensive medicine and strategic interactions in physician–patient networks / Delpini, Danilo; Russu, Paolo. - (2023), pp. 243-246. (Intervento presentato al convegno THE 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPLEX NETWORKS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS tenutosi a Menton, France nel 28-30 November, 2023).
Defensive medicine and strategic interactions in physician–patient networks
Delpini, Danilo
;Russu, Paolo
2023-01-01
Abstract
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.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.