Getting Tools Used Research |
|
The public’s use of healthcare decision tools lags behind expectations. In response, CFAH gathered insights from top industry leaders and analysts about popular consumer guides outside the healthcare sector. Their insights, along with data from research and trade publications, has generated lessons that healthcare stakeholders can apply to improve the development and dissemination of tools.
CFAH, the Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California Health Care Foundation, and the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making provided financial and technical support for the project.
Background: Americans use a variety of purchasing guides to help make choices about the cars they drive, the schools to which they send their children and the mutual funds in which they invest. Such guides have successfully helped many consumers consider a wide array of features when they have many options and limited time to do their own analyses.
In the healthcare sector, both commercial and non-profit groups have developed tools to help people make informed decisions about health plans, hospitals, long-term care facilities, doctors, and medical treatments. But these tools are not being used as widely and frequently as hoped by their developers, even as consumer-driven healthcare advances.
The Research: This research will help healthcare groups improve their approaches to tool development, marketing, and promotion with the aim of increasing consumers’ use of decision tools to make informed choices about various aspects of their care.
The Center first obtained insights on widely used purchasing guides in non-healthcare sectors of the consumer economy. Discussions with corporate officials and industry analysts focused on factors in the development, marketing, dissemination and use of purchasing guides that resulted in widespread use. The resulting products include detailed case studies of four successful consumer guides: Consumer Reports: Car Buying Guide; eBay; U.S. News & World Report: America’s Best Colleges, and the FDA’s federally mandated Nutrition Facts Panels.
In the second project phase, a panel of five leaders with expertise in the development and dissemination of decision support tools for healthcare examined the four cases to extract lessons that developers and marketers of healthcare-related tools can apply to increase their use. The panel of reviewers included Margaret Holmes-Rovner, PhD: Professor of Health Services Research in the Department of Medicine, Michigan State University; David Kanouse, PhD: Senior Behavioral Scientist at RAND Corporation; Stephen Parente, PhD, MPH: Academic Director, Medical Industry Leadership Institute, Associate Professor School of Finance at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota; Dale Shaller, MPA: Shaller Consulting; Shoshanna Sofaer, PhD: Professor of Health Care Policy, Baruch College, CUNY. Their individual commentaries are included in the materials.
You may download the key findings from our Executive Summary, the Lessons Learned and the Advancing Healthcare Decision Aids documents. The full GTU document is also available to download. Use the table of content on the right to navigate your search.
Through this project, we have gained a deep appreciation of the complex factors at play, a clearer idea of how to apply appropriate techniques to analyze and assess the problem, and new insights into how to deal with the untidy uncertainties of real people making life altering choices about their health and health care.
CFAH is an independent non-profit organization that receives funding from the Annenberg Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and others.
