ArticleBMC health services research2014
Application of propensity scores to explore the effect of public reporting of medicine use information on rational drug use in China: a quasi-experimental design.
Article in BMC health services research, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Transparency interventions to improve health system outcomes in low and middle-income countries: a narrative systematic review.BMJ open · 2024Pooled it
- The Contingent Payoff of Transparency: The Mediating Roles of Citizen Participation and Enforcement in Health Service Delivery Improvement.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Review
- A comparative analysis of survival outcomes and adverse effects between preoperative brachytherapy with radical surgery and concurrent chemoradiotherapy in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Identifying key influences on antibiotic use in China: a systematic scoping review and narrative synthesis.BMJ open · 2022Article
- A Multilevel Logit Estimation on the Determinants of Utilization of Preventive Health Care and Healthy Lifestyle Practice in China.World medical & health policy · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTransparency has become a hottest topic and a growing movement in the health care system worldwide. This study used a quasi-experimental design method to explore whether public reporting of medicine use information can improve rational drug use.
methods20 township hospitals and 274 doctors of City Y in Hubei Province, China were divided into the intervention and control groups on the basis of their characteristics. In the intervention group, the values and rankings of the average expenditure per prescription, percentage of prescriptions requiring antibiotics and percentage of prescriptions requiring injections of each hospital and doctor were publicly released to patients and doctors in an appropriate format monthly. Data were gathered both four months before and after the intervention. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to minimize the observed covariate (gender, age, experience, education level, title, and monthly income) differences in the doctors' characteristics. 108 pairs of doctors were obtained after PSM. Chi-square test and t-test were employed to explore the effect of public reporting of medicine use information on rational drug use. The study was approved by the Committee of Tongji Medical College, Hua Zhong University of Science and Technology (IORG No: IORG0003571).
resultsIn baseline, the average expenditure per prescription of the 274 doctors was 42.82 RMB yuan (USD 6.97), the percentage of prescriptions requiring antibiotics was 63.00%, and the percentage of prescriptions requiring injections was 70.79%, all higher than the average of Hubei Province and the standard recommended by WHO. Before the intervention all the three indicators were all comparable (p > 0.05), whereas after the intervention, a significant difference (p < 0.05) was found for the percentage of prescriptions requiring injections between the intervention (64.66%) and control groups (70.52%).
conclusionsIrrational drug use remains a policy issue in township hospitals in the study area. We demonstrated that publicly reporting medicine use information could decrease the percentage of prescriptions requiring injections in township hospitals in China, but this effect was not observed on prescription costs and antibiotics use. Analyses of the mechanism and long-term effect of public reporting of medicine use information are recommended for further studies.
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