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Description & Citation--Study No. 4584

Bibliographic Description

ICPSR Study No.:4584
 
Title:Community Tracking Study Physician Survey, 2004-2005: [United States]
 
Principal Investigator(s):Center for Studying Health System Change
 
Series:Community Tracking Study Series
 
Funding Agency:Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
 
Bibliographic Citation:Center for Studying Health System Change. COMMUNITY TRACKING STUDY PHYSICIAN SURVEY, 2004-2005: [UNITED STATES] [Computer file]. ICPSR04584-v2. Washington, DC: Center for Studying Health System Change [producer], 2006. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2008-05-14.
 

Scope of Study

Summary:This is the fourth round of the physician survey component of the Community Tracking Study (CTS). The first round was conducted in 1996-1997 (ICPSR 2597), the second round in 1998-1999 (ICPSR 3267), and the third in 2000-2001 (ICPSR 3820). Sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CTS is a large-scale investigation of changes in the American health care system and their effects on people. As in the previous rounds, physicians were sampled in the 60 CTS sites: 51 metropolitan and 9 nonmetropolitan areas that were randomly selected to form the core of the CTS and to be representative of the nation as a whole. However, the fourth round lacks an independent supplemental national sample of physicians, which augmented the CTS site sample in the previous rounds. Information collected by the survey includes net income from the practice of medicine, year of birth, sex, race, Hispanic origin, year of graduation from medical school, specialty, board certification status, compensation model, patient mix (e.g., race/Hispanic origin of patients and percent with chronic conditions), career satisfaction, practice type, size, and ownership, percent of practice revenue from Medicare, Medicaid, or managed care, acceptance of new Medicaid and Medicare patients and, if applicable, reasons for not accepting them, use of information technology for care management, number of patient visits and hours worked in medically related activities during the last complete week of work, and the number of hours spent providing charity care in the last month. In addition, the survey elicited views on a number of issues such as patient-physician interactions, competition among practices, the influence of financial incentives on the quantity of services provided to patients, trends in the amount and quality of nursing support, one's ability to provide quality care and obtain needed services for patients, and the importance of various factors that may limit the quality of care. Part 3, the Site and County Crosswalk Data File, identifies the counties that constitute each CTS site. Part 4, Physician Survey Summary File, contains site-level estimates and standard errors for selected physician characteristics, e.g., the average age of physicians, the average percentage of patients with a formulary, and the percentage of physicians who said medical errors in hospitals are a minor problem.
 
Subject Term(s):career satisfaction, communities, health care delivery, health care facilities, health care services, medical specializations, patient care, physician patient relationship, physician practice, physicians
 
Geographic Coverage:United States
 
Time Period:2004 - 2005
 
Date(s) of Collection:2004 - 2005
 
Universe:Physicians practicing in the contiguous United States who provided direct patient care for at least 20 hours per week. The survey excluded federal employees, specialists in fields in which the primary focus was not direct patient care, graduates of foreign medical schools who were only temporarily licensed to practice in the United States, physicians who had not completed their medical training (residents, interns, and fellows), and physicians who requested of the American Medical Association (AMA) that their names not be released to outsiders.
 
Data Type:survey data
 
Data Collection Notes:Additional information about this study can be found at the Web site of the Center for Studying Health System Change (link).
 

Methodology

Sample:Based on a sampling frame derived from the AMA Masterfile (which includes non-AMA members) and the American Osteopathic Association membership file, the sample design involved randomly selecting both physicians who were interviewed by the third round of the CTS Physician Survey and physicians who were not included in earlier rounds of the survey. Among the 6,628 physicians who were interviewed in round four, 4,428 also responded to round three. Only those physicians whose mailing address fell within the boundary of one of the 60 sites were selected for the survey.
 
Mode of Data Collection:computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI)
 

Access and Availability

Note:A list of the data formats available for this study can be found in the summary of holdings. Detailed file-level information (such as record length, case count, and variable count) is listed in the file manifest.
 
Restrictions:This data collection may not be used for any purpose other than statistical reporting and analysis. Use of these data to learn the identity of any person or establishment is prohibited. To preserve respondent anonymity, certain variables are restricted from general dissemination. The Public-Use Version of the Main Data File contains less detailed information than the Restricted-Use Version of the Main Data File. The two files contain the same number of observations, but the public-use file has fewer variables, some of which have undergone more extensive editing than those in the restricted-use file. The restricted-use file identifies the geographic location of the physician's practice (state, county, and CTS site), while the public-use file does not contain any geographic identifiers. Moreover, only the restricted-use file contains the information needed for the computation of accurate standard errors that take into account the complex CTS survey design. And only the restricted-use file contains the information needed to identify and link the records of respondents who were interviewed in both the third and fourth rounds of the CTS Physician Survey. The restricted-use file can be obtained from ICPSR under the terms and conditions of a Restricted Data Use Agreement (link).
 
Original ICPSR Release:2006-10-25
 
Version History:The last update of this study occurred on 2008-05-14.
 
  2008-05-14 - Stata setups were added to the collection. In addition, a missing value label for variable AP1 was added to the SPSS setup for the Restricted-Use Version of the Main Data File.
 
Dataset(s):
  • DS1: Public-Use Version of the Main Data File
  • DS2: Restricted-Use Version of the Main Data File
  • DS3: Site and County Crosswalk Data File
  • DS4: Physician Survey Summary File
 


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