Background and objective: The rising costs of health care continue to make health insurance important for many countries. Health insurance may cover different aspects of health care in Saudi Arabia including the prescribed drugs. Physicians usually have different personal attitudes toward insured and uninsured patients. This study is to investigate the prescribing behavior of physicians to those groups of patients in the private setting.
Design and setting: A prospective study was conducted during the period between October 2011 and January 2012, in three Saudi private hospitals.
Method: Prescriptions for insured and uninsured patients were randomly selected and analyzed. Data regarding diagnosis, age, gender, co-morbidity, number of items and the total cost of the medication in Saudi Riyals (SR) were collected through a chart review form.
Results: Three thousand sixty six patients' prescriptions were included in this study, 34.7% of them were females. 273 patients (75.2%) were insured while 90 were not. 24.8% were patients who paid cash. Majority (57.6%) of the patients were with diabetes plus hypertension and other co-morbidity. 20.7% of patients were taking three medications or less, while 67.8% were taking 4-10 and 11.6% were taking more than 10 medications. Analysis of differences showed that, patients who were insured have a higher number of prescribed medications (p ⩽ 0.001), and a higher total price of prescription than those who were paying cash only (p ⩽ 0.001). In a more confirmatory step, all uninsured patients (n = 90) were closely matched in the age, gender, diagnosis and hospital with similar 90 insured patients. Results of this matching process confirmed the above findings.
Conclusion: Physicians in private setting are more likely to prescribe more drugs and/or brand drugs to insured patients than for uninsured patients. Further studies to view the reasons behind this behavior and strategies to prevent such actions are needed.
Keywords: Diabetes; Hypertension; Insured patients; Prescribing pattern; Prescriptions; Uninsured patients.