Abstract
The health care costs have been rapidly rising in recent years and the public health insurance companies are highly interested in prescription policies of general practitioners. In our contribution, a complex model for prescription behaviour of Belgian general practitioners is built using the structural equation modelling (SEM) framework.
The model involves a large number of prescribed medicament groups as well as doctors' and patients' characteristics. As one of the results, a relatively small number of medicament groups, which effectively describe the prescription behaviour of a given doctor, is obtained.
These indicators are consequently used in a generalized linear model for predicting the drug expenses per patient. Such a model can be used as a useful guideline for the expenses' assessment of a particular practitioner. (C) 2017 Mathematical Institute Slovak Academy of Sciences