title: Where would you go for your next hospitalization?
abstract: We examine the effects of diverse dimensions of hospital quality - including consumers' perceptions of unobserved attributes - on future hospital choice. We utilize consumers' stated preference weights to obtain hospital-specific estimates of perceptions about unmeasured attributes such as reputation. We report three findings. First, consumers' perceptions of reputation and medical services contribute substantially to utility for a hospital choice. Second, consumers tend to select hospitals with high clinical quality scores even before the scores are publicized. However, the effect of clinical quality on hospital choice is relatively small. Third, satisfaction with a prior hospital admission has a large impact on future hospital choice. Our findings suggest that including measures of consumers' experience in report cards may increase their responsiveness to publicized information, but other strategies are needed to overcome the large effects of consumers' beliefs about other quality attributes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Policy and Administration, College of Health and Human Development, The Pennsylvania State University, 604 Ford Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. kuj11@psu.edu
authors.forename: Kyoungrae
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Feldman
authors.forename: Dennis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Scanlon
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003258:Consumer Behavior / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D036262:Empirical Research; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011787:Quality of Health Care