Physicians’ responses to time pressure: experimental evidence on treatment quality and documentation behaviour

Soucek, Claudia, Reggiani, Tommaso ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3134-1049 and Kairies-Schwarz, Nadja 2025. Physicians’ responses to time pressure: experimental evidence on treatment quality and documentation behaviour. Health Policy - The best evidence for better policies , 105302. 10.1016/j.healthpol.2025.105302 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Background. In hospitals, decisions are often made under time pressure. There is, however, little evidence on how time pressure affects the quality of treatment and the documentation behavior of physicians. Setting. We implemented a controlled laboratory experiment with a healthcare framing in which international medical students in the Czech Republic treated patients in the role of hospital physicians. We varied the presence of time pressure and a documentation task. Results. We observed worse treatment quality when individuals were faced with a combination of a documentation task and time pressure. In line with the concept of the speed-accuracy trade-off, we showed that quality changes are likely driven by less accuracy. Finally, we showed that while documentation quality was relatively high overall, time pressure significantly lowered the latter leading to a higher hypothetical profit loss for the hospital. Conclusions. Our results suggest that policy reforms aimed at increasing staffing and promoting novel technologies that facilitate physicians' treatment decisions and support their documentation work in the hospital sector might be promising means of improving the treatment quality and reducing inefficiencies potentially caused by documentation errors.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Uncontrolled Keywords:	physician incentives, work motivation, time pressure, laboratory experiment
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0168-8510
Funders:	(GER) Federal Ministry of Education and Research 01EH1602A, (CZE) Masaryk University - OP JAK CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008743
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 March 2025
Date of Acceptance:	11 March 2025
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2025 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176904

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