Communicating quality of care information to physicians: a study of eight presentation formats.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Non-hospital based physicians usually counsel their patients which hospital to choose. Our aim was to determine which formats for presenting quality of care data are preferred by physicians. METHODS: 300 randomly recruited non-hospital based physicians participated in a survey. We created eight presentation formats which varied in terms of information aggregation and usage of evaluative cues. Participants rated clarity, comprehensibility, information content, acceptance, and preference of the presentation formats. Additionally, we tested physicians' comprehension of the formats. RESULTS: Physicians' ratings of the formats differed significantly (p<0.001). Formats combining numeric information and evaluative cues performed best in terms of information content, comprehensibility and preference. Comprehension of presentation formats also differed (p<0.001). Even though physicians' accuracy of interpreting "Simple Star Rating" was best a majority of participants accepted only formats that contained detailed numerical information (p<0.001). CONCLUSION: In order to support physicians' use of quality of care information in counseling patients, report cards should depict indicator values in a format that combines actual indicator values with evaluative cues. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: If authors of comparative hospital quality reports apply the results of our study in designing reports, the results may increase physicians' use of comparative performance reports in their counseling of patients.