Factors That Motivate Provider Switching: The Patients' Perspective

To generate evidence regarding the specific critical incidents that prompt patients to switch care providers.

Building on existing work on customer switching behavior, we applied the critical incident technique (CIT) to the health services research context and analyzed primary data obtained from 555 US-based patients who reported switching providers between 2018 and 2022 to develop a typology of the critical incidents that prompt patients to switch healthcare providers.

Data were obtained from an online survey of adult US-based patients who reported switching primary care providers (PCPs) for non-insurance-related reasons. The survey was conducted from August to September 2022 using a quota sampling approach.

We found eight critical incident categories associated with patient switching: service encounter failures, pricing, competitor attraction, inconvenience, core service failures, involuntary switching, breakdown in shared decision-making, and service environment perception.

We offer explanations and suggest potentially useful evidence-based strategies for further investigation.