How do patients choose their physician?

What matters to patients when choosing a physician?  Expertise?  Bedside manner?  Previous relationship with the physician? To answer this question, a paper by Groenewoud et al. (2015) conducts a discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey of Dutch patients with knee arthrosis, chronic depression, or Alzheimer’s disease.  They found that patient preferences for their physician depended on the disease. The…

What is attribute non-attendance?

In discrete choice experiments (DCEs), respondents are asked to choose amoung different options which vary across different attributes. For instance, a DCE on mobile phone preferences could have processor speed, battery life, screen size and cost as attributes. A DCE looking at different treatments could have expected survival, anticipated side effects and cost as attributes.…

PhARMA’s reputation

The pharma industry’s reputation is getting worse. Pharmafile reports that “35.4% said that multinational pharma companies had either an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ reputation in 2013. While this is about the same result as in 2012, it is well below 2011 when 41% of respondents gave that answer.” Below are the 2013 reputation rankings for different…

American Views on HIV/AIDS

A survey by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation revealed the following regarding Americans opinions on HIV and AIDS: 45 percent say they would be “very comfortable” in having their child having an HIV+ teacher, up from 36 percent in 2011. 79 percent say that everyone with HIV in the U.S. should get treatment…

Physicians on National Health Insurance

An Annals of Internal Medicine survey sheds some light on physicians opinions regarding universal health care. Overall 59% of physicians support national health insurance and 32% oppose it. Support for national health insurance increased 10 percentage points since 2002 (49%). Unsurprisingly, surgical subspecialties, anesthesiologists, and radiologists, were the only specialities where more than half of…