Beyond the Clock:Exploring the Causal Relationship between General Practitioner Time Allocation and Hospital Referrals

This paper presents an analysis of an experiment conducted in the Netherlands to evaluate the impact of a new way of working for General Practitioners (GPs) with respect to hospital referrals and healthcare spending. The new way of working gave GPs more time to spend on each patient, and we employed a Bayesian difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of this intervention. To assess the impact of the new way of working, we created a control group consisting of regional GP practices that did not implement the new approach and analyzed data on hospital referrals and healthcare spending in both the practice that implemented the new approach (the treatment practice) and the control group, both before and after the intervention. Our analysis shows that the new approach led to a substantial reduction in the total number of hospital referrals. We also observed a decrease in overall healthcare spending on combined GP and hospital care for the treatment practice relative to the control group