Do family physicians with emergency medicine certification actually practise family medicine?
To answer this question, physician billing data from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) were examined. The OHIP database contains information on fee-for-service emergency departments and selected non-fee-for-service emergency departments that submit shadow (zero dollar) billings to track utilization. Physicians were classified into 4 categories according to the proportion of patient assessments that occurred in an emergency department in the fiscal year 1999/2000: “almost all emergency medicine,” “mostly emergency medicine,” “mostly non-emergency medicine” or “almost no emergency medicine.” Information on physician demographics, practice location and training was obtained from the Ontario Physician Human Resource Data Centre. Twenty-two physicians in non-fee-for-service, non-shadow billing practices were excluded. Of the 345 family physicians with emergency medicine certification included in the study, 194 (56%) were in the “almost all” or “mostly” emergency medicine categories (
