Agenda

Marco Bertoni (Università di Padova) - Digital Access to Healthcare Services and Healthcare Utilization: A Quasi-Experimen

Abstract:
We exploit the introduction of a web portal allowing women to manage their appointments in the public cervical cancer screening program of an Italian Local Health Unit (LHU). We investigate how this intervention affects program participation and the ability of the LHU to collect information on women’s screening outside the program. We use administrative data from the LHU and a difference- in-differences design to compare outcomes of women in the treated group (n=870), who could reschedule appointments either through phone calls or through the portal, and the control group (n=768), who could only reschedule by phone. The portal reduces the number of appointments rescheduled by
phone. It also makes women more likely to report both screenings outside the program and the reason for cancelling their appointments. However, the portal also decreases the  probability of screening by 15.7 percentage points. Two-thirds of this reduction is due to increased unjustified no-shows.