Competition among physicians and retail clinics drive up antibiotic prescribing rate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/jhm-cap022515.php

Public Release: 25-Feb-2015
Johns Hopkins Medicine

Competition among doctors' offices, urgent care centers and retail medical clinics in wealthy areas of the U.S. often leads to an increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written per person, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has found.

"We found that both the number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate," the researchers say in a report on the findings published online ahead of print in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

"The increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in wealthy areas appears to be driven primarily by increased competition among doctors' offices, retail medical clinics and other health care providers as they seek to keep patients satisfied with medical care and customer service," says lead study author Eili Klein, Ph.D., an assistant professor of emergency medicine in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences.

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