What drives poor quality of care for child diarrhea? Experimental evidence from India

Most healthcare providers in developing countries know that oral rehydration salts (ORS) is a lifesaving treatment for child diarrhea, yet few prescribe it. This know-do gap has puzzled experts for decades and has cost millions of lives. Using several randomized controlled trials among private providers in 253 towns in India, we estimated the extent to which ORS under-prescription is driven by financial incentives to sell more lucrative medicines, stock-outs of ORS, and provider perceptions that patients do not want ORS. We found that patients expressing a preference for ORS increased ORS prescribing by 27 percentage points. Eliminating stock-outs increased ORS provision by 6.8 percentage points. Eliminating financial incentives to sell medicines had no effect on average but increased ORS prescribing at pharmacies by 9 percentage points. Our findings, combined with patient exit surveys suggest that provider perceptions that patients do not want ORS explain 42% of under-prescribing, whil..., This data set includes data that was collected using provider surveys (recorded in Survey CTO), from standardized patient visits, and from caretaker surveys. The order of operations was: 

Providers and caretakers were surveyed at the beginning of the study
Standardized patients anonymously visited providers and completed a debrief survey directly after the visit
A few hours after the standardized patient, the team visited the provider again to record information on medicine inventory
, , # What drives poor quality of care for child diarrhea? Experimental evidence from India

These data were used for the paper \"What drives poor quality of care for child diarrhea? Experimental evidence from India\" by Wagner, Mohanan, Zutshi, Mukherji, and Sood. The data were collected in Bihar and Karnataka, India in 2022.

## Description of the data and file structure

There are three different data sets included all in Stata (.dta) format:

**1. ORS HH Main_noDCE:** This is a survey of caretakers who had a child 10-years-old or younger with a case of diarrhea within 4 weeks prior to the survey. The key them of the survey is treatment seeking, what happened when they sought treatment, and what they did to treat their child's diarrhea. It also includes perceptions of and preferences for different child diarrhea treatments. This can be geo-linked to the other data sets via a town code but caretakers were not surveyed in every town for which the other surveys were conducted.

**2. Provide...