title: Health services utilization of people having and not having a regular doctor in Canada.
abstract: Canada having a universal health insurance plan that provides hospital and physician benefits offers a natural experiment of whether continuity of care actually provides lower or higher utilization of services. The question we are evaluating is whether Canadians, who have a regular physician, use more health resources than those who do not have one? Using two statistical methods, including propensity score matching and zero-inflated negative binomial regression, we analyzed data from the 2010 and 2007/2008 Canadian Community Health Surveys separately to document differences between people self-reportedly having and not having a regular doctor in the utilization of general practitioner, specialist, and hospital services. The results showed, consistently for all two statistical methods and two datasets used, that people reportedly having a regular doctor used more healthcare services than a matched group of people who was self-reportedly not having a regular doctor. For specialist and hospital utilization, the statistically significant differences were in the likelihood if the service was used but not in the number of specialist visits or hospital nights among users. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
authors: Institute of Health Economics, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
authors: Nguyen Xuan
authors: NX
authors: Thanh
authors: Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA.
authors: John
authors: J
authors: Rapoport
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002170:Canada; D002648:Child; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006296:Health Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010821:Physicians, Family; D019472:Universal Health Insurance; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Canada; family doctor; health services utilization