Understanding Patients’ Preferences for Referrals to Specialists for an Asymptomatic Condition

Robert Dunlea and Leslie Lenert

Medical Decision Making, 2015, vol. 35, issue 6, 691-702

Abstract: Background: A specialty referral is a common but complex decision that often requires a primary care provider to balance his or her own interests with those of the patient. Objective: To examine the factors that influence a patient’s choice of a specialist for consultation for an asymptomatic condition and better understand the tradeoffs that patients are and are not willing to make in this decision. Design: Stratified cross-sectional convenience sample of subjects selected to parallel US population demographics. Participants: Members of an Internet survey panel who reported seeing a physician in the past year whose responses met objective quality metrics for attention. Main measures: Respondents completed an adaptive conjoint analysis survey comparing specialists regarding eight attributes. The reliability of assessments and the predictive validity of models were measured using holdout samples. The relative importance (RI) of different attributes was computed using paired t tests. The implications of utility values were studied using market simulation methods. Key results: Five hundred and thirty subjects completed the survey and had responses that met quality criteria. The reliability of responses was high (86% agreement), and models were predictive of patients’ preferences (82.6% agreement with holdout choices). The most important attribute for patients was out-of-pocket cost (RI of 19.5%, P

Keywords: patient referral; patient preferences; conjoint analysis; health services research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X14566640 (text/html)

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:sae:medema:v:35:y:2015:i:6:p:691-702

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X14566640

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().