Comparative Quality Indicators for Hospital Choice: Do General Practitioners Care?

Marie Ferrua, Claude Sicotte, Benoît Lalloué and Etienne Minvielle

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 2, 1-9

Abstract: Context: The strategy of publicly reporting quality indicators is being widely promoted through public policies as a way to make health care delivery more efficient. Objective: To assess general practitioners’ (GPs) use of the comparative hospital quality indicators made available by public services and the media, as well as GPs’ perceptions of their qualities and usefulness. Method: A telephone survey of a random sample representing all self-employed GPs in private practice in France. Results: A large majority (84.1%–88.5%) of respondents (n = 503; response rate of 56%) reported that they never used public comparative indicators, available in the mass media or on government and non-government Internet sites, to influence their patients’ hospital choices. The vast majority of GPs rely mostly on traditional sources of information when choosing a hospital. At the same time, this study highlights favourable opinions shared by a large proportion of GPs regarding several aspects of hospital quality indicators, such as their good qualities and usefulness for other purposes. In sum, the results show that GPs make very limited use of hospital quality indicators based on a consumer choice paradigm but, at the same time, see them as useful in ways corresponding more to the usual professional paradigms, including as a means to improve quality of care.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147296 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 47296&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0147296

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147296

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().