Motivating Public Use of Physician-Level Performance Data

Despite widening efforts to publicly report health care quality data, patients appear to make little use of these data. Several studies indicate patients' interest in physician-level information, but actual use of physician-level data remains unestablished. Using a randomized experimental design, this study evaluates the extent to which use of a Web site offering physician-level data is affected by three parameters: invitation mode (mail vs. e-mail), employment status (employed vs. retired), and invitation message tone (risk- vs. gain-focused). The results find significantly higher use among those invited by e-mail (p < .001) and among retired adults (p < .001). Message tone is not significantly associated with use rates, but a borderline significant result suggests that high-risk message recipients behave differently from those receiving gain-focused messages (p = .052). The findings emphasize the importance of convenience and process-simplicity in fostering public use of quality data and call for further study of message-tone effects.