Themes affecting health-care consumers' choice of a hospital for elective surgery when receiving web-based comparative consumer information.
OBJECTIVE
To get insights into the decision-making strategy of health-care consumers when confronted with comparative consumer information.


METHODS
Qualitative descriptive study among 18 consumers who had a hip or knee replacement no longer than five years ago. To study their decision-making strategies a paper draft for a website was used providing comparative consumer information. Data were collected by cognitive interviews and focus-group meetings and subjected to thematic analysis.


RESULTS
Consumers were able to understand the presented information, but had problems to use it as a decision aid. They primarily relied on previous experiences. Four themes were revealed: decision making, perceived benefits, unmet information needs, and trustworthiness. Consumers used different decision strategies and showed unpredictable behavior when choosing a hospital.


CONCLUSIONS
Individual decision strategies, unsatisfied information needs, limited tenability and too coarse aggregation levels of quality scores are barriers for a proper use of comparative consumer information. Personal experience remains a valuable information source for hospital selection. We suggest that a website presenting comparative consumer information should be flexible in various ways and should include functionality to share personal experience.
Moser
Albine
A
Caphri School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Korstjens
Irene
I
van der Weijden
Trudy
T
Tange
Huibert
H
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D019985:Benchmarking; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D017558:Elective Surgical Procedures; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D006266:Health Education; D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D010465:Perception; D036301:Qualitative Research; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D013637:Tape Recording; D035502:Trust