Therapeutic traditions, patient socioeconomic characteristics and physicians' early new drug prescribing–a multilevel analysis of rosuvastatin prescription in south Sweden

To investigate the role that both patient and outpatient factors related to health care practice (HCP) play in physicians’ early adoption of rosuvastatin. Generalized estimation equations (GEEs) and alternating logistic regression (ALR) with pair-wise odds ratios (PWORs) were used to measure similarities in rosuvastatin prescription within HCPs for all individuals with statin prescriptions in Skane region, Sweden. After 12 months, 53% of the HCPs had adopted the new statin. Rosuvastatin prescriptions co-occured within certain HCPs 3.56 times more often than one would have expected based on a random distribution. Private HCPs had four times higher probability of prescribing rosuvastatin than public HCPs. Contextual characteristics of the HCP seem to be relevant for understanding physicians’ motivation to adopt rosuvastatin. Moreover, our study reveals inequity in health care as the socioeconomic status of the patients appears to influence the prescribing behavior of the physicians irrespective of medical reasons.