Modelling prescription behaviour of general practitioners

The health care costs have been rapidly rising in recent years and the public health insurance companies are highly interested in prescription policies of general practitioners. In our contribution, a complex model for prescription behaviour of Belgian general practitioners is built using the structural equation modelling (SEM) framework. The model involves a large number of prescribed medicament groups as well as doctors’ and patients’ characteristics. As one of the results, a relatively small number of medicament groups, which effectively describe the prescription behaviour of a given doctor, is obtained. These indicators are consequently used in a generalized linear model for predicting the drug expenses per patient. Such a model can be used as a useful guideline for the expenses’ assessment of a particular practitioner.