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Factors Influencing Healthcare-Seeking Preferences Among Patients in County Medical Consortium in China: A Discrete
1Dongyang Hospital Affiliated to Wenzhou Medical University, Jinhua, Zhejiang, People's Republic of China.
Purpose:
Under China's county medical consortium system, this study explores how level of care integration and other key attributes of medical institutions influence patients' healthcare choices and examines differences in preferences among population subgroups.
Patients And Methods:
This study constructed a virtual medical institution choice set using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with eight institutional attributes. A total of 676 respondents were recruited via an online convenience sample on the Credamo platform using a self-developed questionnaire. The conditional logit model and fixed effects model were adopted to analyze 10,816 valid observations.
Results:
Medical quality emerges as the primary factor influencing patients' healthcare choices, followed by the level of care integration. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that rural residents and individuals with lower educational attainment prioritize practical factors such as convenience and medical costs. Individuals with higher education levels and female patients demonstrate greater concern for medical care quality.
Conclusion:
All findings reflect stated preferences in hypothetical scenarios rather than observed healthcare-seeking behavior. Within this stated-preference framework, higher levels of integrated care, streamlined referral procedures and higher levels of information sharing were consistently associated with stronger patient choice. Importantly, we make no causal claim that these preferences directly predict real-world care-seeking or system-level outcomes. To move from stated preference to observed behavior, future research combining offline representative sampling with real utilization data is needed to validate and extend these patterns.
