Patient Choice in Acute Care

Abstract

Consumer healthcare information plays a critical \ role in informing patients who participate in or make healthcare \ decisions for themselves without direct supervision of a healthcare \ professional. One such example is the choice of facility for \ acute care, prototypically between a fully equipped emergency \ care department (ED) at a hospital and a more convenient \ but less capable urgent care (UC) or retail clinic. We model \ a strategic patient making this decision taking into account the \ limited medical information and convenience factors that affect \ the patient’s decision. This model is then used to inform the \ pricing decision made by the manager of the UC. We show that \ a separating equilibrium, in which all patients self-triaged as noncritical \ choose to go to the UC first, dominates pooling equilibria \ for moderate error rates in self-triage. We analyze the separating \ equilibrium to examine the effect of consumer health information \ (CHI) systems, and show that as the quality of the CHI decreases \ and the error rates go up, the co-pay for an UC decreases, the \ facility is smaller, and makes less profit.