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Consumer Decision-Making Strategies and Use of Hospital Quality Measures

As the burden of healthcare costs shifts toward the consumer, transparent quality and cost information will improve consumers' abilities to make sound judgments about where to receive healthcare—but only if the presentation of the information fits consumers' styles of decision making. This paper describes an empirical method that allows institutions and organizations to better understand the patterns by which consumers process cost and quality information. This research provides a framework that institutions and organizations can use to design healthcare scorecards that facilitate thoughtful consumer choices, which will incentivize hospitals to proactively improve their quality of care. Study participants (N=45) completed a computer-based decision scenario during which they rated the importance of four healthcare quality measures, viewed quality ratings for three hospitals, and ranked the three hospitals in preference order. The methodology described in this paper allowed researchers to analyze participants' information acquisition behaviors and to determine their decision-making strategies, shedding light on how consumers might value and use hospital quality information. Initial study findings suggest that those designing quality reports should allow consumers to tailor the information they view, and allow consumers to easily compare quality measures across hospitals of interest, rather than quality measures for a single institution to known benchmarks.