Abstract
The factors influencing General Practitioners’ (GPs) prescribing behavior are diverse in terms of health care policies and regulations, GPs’ education and experience, demographic trends and disease profiles. Thus, it can be useful to analyze the specific local patterns, as they affect the quality of healthcare and the stability of the healthcare market. The aim of the present longitudinal retrospective study is to investigate the prescription of generic drugs in a database of about 4.6 million prescriptions from a sample of 38 GPs practicing in Salerno, Italy, within a timeframe of 15 years, from 2001 to 2015. The GPs in our study show a general tendency to increase prescriptions of generic drugs during the studied time span, to fulfill regulatory obligations and with some differences in prescription behavior according to age, gender and experience. The generics prescription depends also on the different diagnoses, with some diagnostic areas showing a greater generic drug prescription rate. Expanding this research to larger datasets would allow deepening the knowledge of the patterns of GPs’ prescribing decisions, to provide evidence to be used in comparison between different national settings.
Highlights
Significant differences exist among the prescribing behavior of General Practitioners’ (GPs) for brand-name and generic drugs in the major European countries [1,2,3]; these may create problems because of adverse effects on the cost of healthcare and, on the local economy.During the 1990s, Italian health authorities identified prescribing patterns in general practice as a particular area for improvement in the healthcare industry, because healthcare expenditure was growing out of control
There is some variability in the case of female GPs, the total tendency closely follows a linear trend of 0.915 ± 0.013% per year, with a correlation coefficient r = 0.998 and p < 0.001
This indicates a constant tendency of GPs to adopt the national directives about the prescription of generic drugs and a parallel increase in the availability of generic alternatives to the other drugs
Summary
Significant differences exist among the prescribing behavior of GPs for brand-name and generic drugs in the major European countries [1,2,3]; these may create problems because of adverse effects on the cost of healthcare and, on the local economy.During the 1990s, Italian health authorities identified prescribing patterns in general practice as a particular area for improvement in the healthcare industry, because healthcare expenditure was growing out of control. Several researchers have proposed models attempting to explain the process of decision making that leads a GP to prescribe a particular drug over another [5,6], that is, a brand-name drug versus a generic. Some of these models indicate external factors related to GPs’ prescribing patterns such as the introduction of new pharmaceutical policies, marketing and promotional agendas developed by pharmaceutical companies, the introduction of new, effective drugs and trade-name drugs and the less expensive generic substitutes for these drugs
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