Formal Professional Relationships Between General Practitioners and Specialists in Shared Care: Possible Associations with Patient Health and Pharmacy Costs

Background Shared care in chronic disease management aims at improving service delivery and patient outcomes, and reducing healthcare costs. The introduction of shared-care models is coupled with mixed evidence in relation to both patient health status and cost of care. Professional interactions among health providers are critical to a successful and efficient shared-care model. Objective This article investigates whether the strength of formal professional relationships between general practitioners (GPs) and specialists (SPs) in shared care affects either the health status of patients or their pharmacy costs. In strong GP–SP relationships, the patient health status is expected to be high, due to efficient care coordination, and the pharmacy costs low, due to effective use of resources. Methods This article measures the strength of formal professional relationships between GPs and SPs through the number of shared patients and proxies the patient health status by the number of comorbidities diagnosed and treated. To test the hypotheses and compare the characteristics of the strongest GP–SP connections with those of the weakest, this article concentrates on diabetes—a chronic condition where patient care coordination is likely important. Diabetes generates the largest shared patient cohort in Hungary, with the highest frequency of specialist medication prescriptions. Results This article finds that stronger ties result in lower pharmacy costs, but not in higher patient health status. Conclusion Overall drug expenditure may be reduced by lowering patient care fragmentation through channelling a GP’s patients to a small number of SPs.