Network of general practitioners and specialists: Profiting from the knowledge about their professional interaction

Health policy makers: they have a dream. A dream about an ideally built shared-care system where general practitioners, who control patient access to specialist care, would prescribe specialist medicines within an informed and transparent professional network. An ideal shared-care system where professional loyalty and fluidity would be the norm.

According to Doctor Agnes Lubloy, this would not only ensure a smoother integration of patients between those two main branches of the medical profession, but also lead to reduced healthcare expenditures. Yet nowadays in Hungary, several specialists leave the country and search for a medical job elsewhere. At the same time the number of freshly graduated doctors is continuously decreasing and the number of chronic patients is steadily increasing in an aging society. Notwithstanding the fact that all these processes have severe consequences on both patients and doctors, there is a crucial need for a smoother and more effective collaboration between general practitioners and specialists.

In line with her interest in the quantitative dynamics which regulate professional networks, Dr. Lubloy seeks to determine and investigate the role of socio-demographic and network topological factors in the efficiency of general practitioners and specialists’ professional interactions. For example, thanks to her skills in social network modeling, she intends to map the spreading process of new drugs and innovative procedures, along with the effects of structural changes in the network of specialists, both on patients and doctors.

The outcomes of her research could prove useful for local health policy makers to assess the efficiency of their healthcare systems and rule out costly and/or outdated practices.

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