Variable selection and definition in the analysis of patient-sharing relationship in Yinzhou
| Variable | Definition | Meaning |
| Persistence ratio | The proportion of the patient-sharing relationships in a given year that continue to exist in the following year. | Reflecting long-term relationships across years, the professional knowledge may diffuse through the network and have an effect on the physicians’ prescription behaviour. |
| Relationship strength | The number of sharing patients between physicians. | Representing a more stable patient-sharing relationship, higher persistence ratio and long-term patient-sharing relationships have positive effects on knowledge diffusion in the network. |
| Hospital characteristics | Whether the related physicians of the patient-sharing relationship are from the same hospital. | The patient-sharing relationships among different physician specialties are conducive to representing whether knowledge diffusion in a larger geographical area is helpful to the update of clinical treatment experience. |
| Physician specialty | The specialty of the related physicians in a patient-sharing relationship. | Regions with higher persistent ties tended to have lower rates of emergency medical visits, and regions where PCPs had more physician connections were more likely to have higher emergency medical visits. |
| Relationship occurrence year | The year of the visit when the physician-sharing relationship happened. | The impact of occurrence year on the patient-sharing relationships could help to understand the trend, and other influencing factors on the patient-sharing relationships (eg, policy factors) could help to explore and assess the network-based interventions. |