LCHE Seminar- A Prescription for Knowledge: Patient Information and Generic Substitution

The Lausanne Center for Health Economics, Behavior, and Policy (LCHE) regularly organizes seminars about Health Economics. More details on www.lche.ch.

Topic of the Seminar

A Prescription for Knowledge: Patient Information and Generic Substitution

We study how informing patients about the availability of generic drugs influencing their purchasing decisions for prescription drugs. Exploiting the dissemination of 60,000 targeted informational letters by a large Swiss health insurer as a novel natural experiment and using detailed claim-level data, we find that informing brand purchasers about generic alternatives increases the probability of generic substitution fourfold. The effect does not substantially depend on whether patients face a copayment. Our results highlight the limits of health-care policies that rely solely on financial incentives.

Speaker

• Dr. Nicolas Schreiner
  • Research economist at and the deputy director of the CSS Institute for Empirical Health Economics, as well as a research fellow at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel

Practical information

• Free admission
• No need to register
• This seminar is given in English.

About LCHE

The Lausanne Center for Health Economics, Behavior, and Policy (LCHE) at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) promotes research, teaching, and policy advice in the fields of health economics, behavior, and policy.

The interdisciplinary center brings together researchers of the Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisanté), the Faculty of Biology and Medicine (CHUV-FBM), and the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC).