Half of primary care doctors provide unnecessary specialty referrals upon patient request
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - 20:20
in Health & Medicine
A study recently published in the American Journal of Managed Care found that more than half of primary care providers reported that they made what they considered unnecessary referrals to a specialist because patients requested it. Many physicians said they yielded to patient requests for brand-name drug prescriptions when cheaper generics were available. This study was conducted by Sapna Kaul, assistant professor of health economics in The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston department of preventive medicine and community health, in collaboration with researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.