ArticleMedical care research and review : MCRR2022
Does the Implementation of Reference Pricing Result in Reduced Utilization? Evidence From Inpatient and Outpatient Procedures.
Article in Medical care research and review : MCRR, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Policy and Regulatory Framework to Promote Care Delivery Redesign and Production Efficiency in Health Care Markets.The Milbank quarterly · 2025Article
- Impact of Reference Pricing on Cost and Quality in Total Joint Arthroplasty.The Journal of bone and joint surgery. American volume · 2019Article
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cardiovascular heart disease medication use: time-series analysis of England's prescription data during the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2019 to October 2020).Therapeutic advances in cardiovascular diseaseArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Reference pricing (RP) is an insurance design that can be used to incentivize patients to use low-price settings. While RP is not intended to affect overall utilization, it could unintentionally reduce utilization. We examined whether utilization was reduced when a large employer adopted RP for selected elective surgeries, including inpatient joint replacement surgery and outpatient cataract surgery, colonoscopy, and arthroscopic surgery. Data included a treatment group subject to RP implementation and a comparison group that was not. We applied autoregressive integrated moving average analysis as comparison-population interrupted time-series analysis to determine whether there were procedure reductions following RP implementation. We find no evidence of short-term decreases (within 3 months of RP implementation). However, we find very modest declines of approximately 14 (20%) fewer arthroscopic knee surgeries 6 months after RP implementation and 129 (17.2%) fewer colonoscopies 8 months after RP implementation. There were no declines in the other procedures examined.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.