MEDICAL DECISION MAKING/MON–MON XXXX 1

Objective: To assess the impact of quality of care and other hospital information on patients ’ choices between hospitals. Methods: 665 former surgical patients were invited to respond to an Internet-based questionnaire including a choice-based conjoint analysis. Each patient was presented with 12 different comparisons of 2 hospi-tals, with each hospital characterized by 6 attributes con-taining 2 levels. Hospital attributes were included if frequently reported by patients as most important for future hospital choices. These included both general hos-pital information (e.g., atmosphere), information on qual-ity of care (e.g., percentage of patients with “textbook outcome”), and surgery-specific information (e.g., possi-bility for minimally invasive procedure). Hierarchial Bayes estimation was used to estimate the utilities for each attri-bute level for each patient. Based on the ranges of these utilities, the relative importance of each hospital attribute was determined for each participant as a measure of the impact on patients ’ choices. Results: 308 (46.3%) ques-tionnaires were available for analysis. Of the hospital attributes that patients considered, surgery-specific infor-mation on average had the highest relative importance (25.7 [23.9–27.5]), regardless of gender, age, and educa-tion. Waiting time and hospital atmosphere were consid-ered least important. The attribute concerning the percentage of patients with “textbook outcomes ” had the second greatest impact (18.3 [16.9–19.6]), which was simi-lar for patients with different adverse outcome experience. Conclusions: Surgery-specific and quality of care informa-tion are more important than general information when patients choose between hospitals. Key words: quality of care; surgery; performance measurement; choice-based conjoint analyses; patient choice; hospital comparison