Does information on quality affect patients’ choice of health care provider?

Abstract: A condition for patient choice in health care to promote quality is that patients act in accordance with information about quality and change to better care providers. In this paper I examine the relation between quality information and patient choice of care provider in the primary care of the county Scania in Sweden. As a natural experiment I use a quality-related award given to the best health care center in Scania. The award can be understood as an exogenous information shock. To estimate the effect from the award I reproduce the counterfactual situation with no information shock by using the synthetic control method. The results show that there is no significant effect from the information shock on the number of listed patients for the award-winning care provider. Therefore improved availability of information on quality seems to have limited effect on patients’ choice of care provider. This suggests that the information-mechanism in the quasi-markets for primary care is not functioning properly, which implies that the incentives for care providers to improve quality are weak.