Where would you go for your next hospitalization?

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Consumer Behavior
• Healthcare Management

Background:

• Understanding factors influencing patient hospital choice is crucial for healthcare providers and policymakers.
• Hospital quality is multidimensional, encompassing both measurable clinical outcomes and unobservable attributes like reputation.
• Patient perceptions significantly shape healthcare decision-making processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of various hospital quality dimensions, including perceived unobserved attributes, on future hospital selection.
• To quantify the influence of reputation, medical services, clinical quality, and prior patient experiences on patient choice.
• To inform strategies for improving the effectiveness of public quality reporting.

Main Methods:

• Utilized stated preference weights from consumers to estimate perceptions of unmeasured hospital attributes.
• Developed hospital-specific estimates for attributes such as reputation.
• Analyzed the relative importance of different quality dimensions in hospital choice models.

Main Results:

• Consumers' perceptions of hospital reputation and medical services significantly contribute to their utility in choosing a hospital.
• Patients tend to favor hospitals with high clinical quality scores even before public disclosure, though this effect is relatively small.
• Prior positive hospital admission experiences strongly influence future hospital choices.

Conclusions:

• Patient perceptions of reputation and satisfaction with past care are major drivers of hospital choice.
• While clinical quality scores have an impact, they are less influential than perceived quality attributes.
• Incorporating patient experience measures into public report cards could enhance responsiveness to quality information, but addressing perceived quality attributes requires additional strategies.