Consumers may be willing to pay more for higher quality imaging services, according to new survey data published Feb. 2 in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Price transparency is the rage in healthcare, with new online tools and government mandates pushing patients to select services based on their anticipated out-of-pocket costs. What if quality metrics were entered into the mix, too? Emory University School of Medicine experts set out to answer this question, utilizing an online crowdsourcing platform.
Reaching more than 1,000 respondents in late 2020, scientists found that price isn’t always king.
“Our analyses show that when cost and quality are presented together in severe back pain [scenarios], potential patients value quality more than cost and are willing to pay more for marginal gains in quality,” Gelareh Sadigh, MD, with the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Atlanta-based Emory, and colleagues wrote Wednesday. “As higher quality care does not necessarily translate to higher cost care, the simultaneous availability of cost and quality measures could help consumers choose higher value (i.e., lower cost and higher quality) providers.”
For the study, Sadigh et al. recruited volunteers using Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online platform used in healthcare research to poll paid potential patients. Participants received $1 for taking part, answering questions about the importance of receiving out-of-pocket MRI estimates alongside quality indicators. The latter included examination results accuracy, physician recommendation of an imaging center based on familiarity, and online star ratings.
When both were presented together, patients preferred the higher cost, higher quality imaging center option over the lower cost, lower quality alternative, the authors found. They also expressed a willingness to pay more for gains in quality, and the perceived importance between cost and quality was not statistically significant in most healthcare scenarios.
“Incorporating quality metrics into price transparency tools is important,” Sadigh and co-authors concluded. “Further research is needed to identify metrics that are most comparable and easily obtainable across imaging centers that remain important to patients.”
Read more, including potential study limitations, in JACR here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.