General practitioners’ income and activity: the impact of multi-professional group practice in France

Résumé En

France has first experimented, in 2009, and then generalized a practice level add-on payment to promote Multi-Professional Primary Care Groups (MPCGs). Team-based practices are intended to improve both the efficiency of outpatient care supply and the attractiveness of medically underserved areas for healthcare professionals. To evaluate its financial attractiveness and thus the sustainability of MPCGs, we analyzed the evolution of incomes (self-employed income and wages) of General Practitioners (GPs) enrolled in a MPCG, compared with other GPs. We also studied the impacts of working in a MPCG on GPs’ activity through both the quantity of medical services provided and the number of patients encountered. Our analyses were based on a quasi-experimental design, with a panel dataset over the period 2008–2014. We accounted for the selection into MPCG by using together coarsened exact matching and difference-in-differences (DID) design with panel-data regression models to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We show that GPs enrolled in MPCGs during the period exhibited an increase in income 2.5% higher than that of other GPs; there was a greater increase in the number of patients seen by the GPs’ (88 more) without involving a greater increase in the quantity of medical services provided. A complementary cross-sectional analysis for 2014 showed that these changes were not detrimental to quality in terms of bonuses related to the French pay-for-performance program for the year 2014. Hence, our results suggest that labor and income concerns should not be a barrier to the development of MPCGs, and that MPCGs may improve patient access to primary care services.