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Steven A. Schroeder, MD; Stephen J. McPhee, MD; Jonathan A. Showstack, MPH
University of California San Francisco

JAMA. 1985;253(13):1876-1877.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

Soumerai and Avorn take issue with the conclusions that we drew from a recent prospective cost containment experiment at the University of California, San Francisco. Based on our study and other published (and unpublished) work, we concluded that "in the absence of other cost containing incentives, physician education alone is not an effective hospital cost containment strategy."

Frankly, we are puzzled by their objections. Our study was prospective and randomized, with concurrent control groups. Contrary to what Soumerai and Avorn suggest, as described in our article, we had sufficient statistical power to detect an economically significant difference between the intervention and control groups had it occurred.

They cite in refutation two studies that show changes in prescribing patterns by community-based physicians for Medicaid patients after educational interventions. One of these studies dealt only with prescribing in office practices¹; the other appears to be limited to office prescriptions, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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