Putting all this together, the findings say higher spending by physicians is associated with lower claims, what that means is more difficult to say.

Anupam Jena

It could certainly impact children and younger adults with asthma, we just needed to have the specific data Medicare provides so we could compare hospitalization rates with weather patterns in small areas.

The visits were not during the thunderstorm when the rains are coming down, and after the storm is over, we saw the rates of visits to the ER went down.

There is a lot of discussion about how movies and other media influence behaviour. But it’s hard to study.

When you’re being monitored you behave differently and you do your job differently, one thing you could do would be to ensure that when key clinical decisions are being made, you have a disruption-free policy, so that doctors and nurses cannot be disrupted unless it’s an emergency.

They have a lot at stake if they don’t get accredited by the Joint Commission, and they also have the resources to mobilize their staff hospital-wide to respond.

If you aggregate over the entire US population of Medicare beneficiaries, it’s a large impact.

The states that we looked at had this information online.

What needs to drive that accountability is unclear.

If you ask physicians what’s the number one concern they have when you talk to them about their careers, I would say malpractice will come up as one of their top concerns.

If you look at doctors who spend more in a given specialty, higher spending physicians get sued less often than low spending physicians.

The take-home message for patients is that healthy lifestyle choices and good health are important but are n’t easy to come by, both take work and even health care professionals find it difficult.

This highlights the notion that nobody is fully immune to the factors that promote unhealthy lifestyle behaviors.