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      Underlying determinants of health provider choice in urban slums: results from a discrete choice experiment in Ahmedabad, India

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          Abstract

          Background

          Severe underutilization of healthcare facilities and lack of timely, affordable and effective access to healthcare services in resource-constrained, bottom of pyramid (BoP) settings are well-known issues, which foster a negative cycle of poor health outcomes, catastrophic health expenditures and poverty. Understanding BoP patients’ healthcare choices is vital to inform policymakers’ effective resource allocation and improve population health and livelihood in these areas. This paper examines the factors affecting the choice of health care provider in low-income settings, specifically the urban slums in India.

          Method

          A discrete choice experiment was carried out to elicit stated preferences of BoP populations. A total of 100 respondents were sampled using a multi-stage systemic random sampling of urban slums. Attributes were selected based on previous studies in developing countries, findings of a previous exploratory study in the study setting and qualitative interviews. Provider type and cost, distance to the facility, attitude of doctor and staff, appropriateness of care and familiarity with doctor were the attributes included in the study. A random effects logit regression was used to perform the analysis. Interaction effects were included to control for individual characteristics.

          Results

          The relatively most valued attribute is appropriateness of care (β=3.4213, p = 0.00), followed by familiarity with the doctor (β=2.8497, p = 0.00) and attitude of the doctor and staff towards the patient (β=1.8132, p = 0.00). As expected, respondents prefer shorter distance (β= − 0.0722, p = 0.00) but the relatively low importance of the attribute distance to the facility indicate that respondents are willing to travel longer if any of the other statistically significant attributes are present. Also, significant socioeconomic differences in preferences were observed, especially with regard to the type of provider.

          Conclusion

          The analyses did not reveal universal preferences for a provider type, but overall the traditional provider type is not well accepted. It also became evident that respondents valued appropriateness of care above other attributes. Despite the study limitations, the results have broader policy implications in the context of Indian government’s attempts to reduce high healthcare out-of-pocket expenditures and provide universal health coverage for its population. The government’s attempt to emphasize the focus on traditional providers should be carefully reconsidered.

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          Most cited references33

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          Priority setting of health interventions: the need for multi-criteria decision analysis

          Priority setting of health interventions is often ad-hoc and resources are not used to an optimal extent. Underlying problem is that multiple criteria play a role and decisions are complex. Interventions may be chosen to maximize general population health, to reduce health inequalities of disadvantaged or vulnerable groups, ad/or to respond to life-threatening situations, all with respect to practical and budgetary constraints. This is the type of problem that policy makers are typically bad at solving rationally, unaided. They tend to use heuristic or intuitive approaches to simplify complexity, and in the process, important information is ignored. Next, policy makers may select interventions for only political motives. This indicates the need for rational and transparent approaches to priority setting. Over the past decades, a number of approaches have been developed, including evidence-based medicine, burden of disease analyses, cost-effectiveness analyses, and equity analyses. However, these approaches concentrate on single criteria only, whereas in reality, policy makers need to make choices taking into account multiple criteria simultaneously. Moreover, they do not cover all criteria that are relevant to policy makers. Therefore, the development of a multi-criteria approach to priority setting is necessary, and this has indeed recently been identified as one of the most important issues in health system research. In other scientific disciplines, multi-criteria decision analysis is well developed, has gained widespread acceptance and is routinely used. This paper presents the main principles of multi-criteria decision analysis. There are only a very few applications to guide resource allocation decisions in health. We call for a shift away from present priority setting tools in health – that tend to focus on single criteria – towards transparent and systematic approaches that take into account all relevant criteria simultaneously.
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            What patients want from primary care consultations: a discrete choice experiment to identify patients' priorities.

            The consultation is fundamental to the delivery of primary care, but different ways of organizing consultations may lead to different patient experiences in terms of access, continuity, technical quality of care, and communication. Patients' priorities for these different issues need to be understood, but the optimal methods for assessing priorities are unclear. This study used a discrete choice experiment to assess patients' priorities. We surveyed patients from 6 family practices in England. The patients chose between primary care consultations differing in attributes such as ease of access (wait for an appointment), choice (flexibility of appointment times), continuity (physician's knowledge of the patient), technical quality (thoroughness of physical examination), and multiple aspects of patient-centered care (interest in patient's ideas, inquiry about patient's social and emotional well-being, and involvement of patient in decision making). We used probit models to assess the relative priority patients placed on different attributes and to estimate how much they were willing to pay for them. Analyses were based on responses from 1,193 patients (a 53% response rate). Overall, patients were willing to pay the most for a thorough physical examination ($40.87). The next most valued attributes of care were seeing a physician who knew them well ($12.18), seeing a physician with a friendly manner ($8.50), having a reduction in waiting time of 1 day ($7.22), and having flexibility of appointment times ($6.71). Patients placed similar value on the different aspects of patient-centered care ($12.06-$14.82). Responses were influenced by the scenario in which the decision was made (minor physical problem vs urgent physical problem vs ambiguous physical or psychological problem) and by patients' demographic characteristics. Although patient-centered care is important to patients, they may place higher priority on the technical quality of care and continuity of care. Discrete choice experiments may be a useful method for assessing patients' priorities in health care.
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              Anthropological and socio-medical health care research in developing countries.

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                vilius.cernauskas@gmail.com
                f.angeli@tilburguniversity.edu
                akjaiswal@iima.ac.in
                m.pavlova@maastrichtuniversity.nl
                Journal
                BMC Health Serv Res
                BMC Health Serv Res
                BMC Health Services Research
                BioMed Central (London )
                1472-6963
                19 June 2018
                19 June 2018
                2018
                : 18
                : 473
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0481 6099, GRID grid.5012.6, Department of Health Services Research, Care and Public Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences, , Maastricht University, ; Duboisdomein 30, P.O. Box 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0943 3265, GRID grid.12295.3d, Department of Organization Studies, School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, , Tilburg University, ; P.O. Box 90153, Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, 5000 LE The Netherlands
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9244 1719, GRID grid.418226.b, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, ; Vastrapur, Ahmedabad 380015 India
                Article
                3264
                10.1186/s12913-018-3264-x
                6006661
                29921260
                c3b6dc19-89e3-42a8-ba36-e8da29d5cf87
                © The Author(s). 2018

                Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 14 January 2018
                : 31 May 2018
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2018

                Health & Social care
                health provider choice,urban slums,health-seeking behaviour,discrete choice experiment,bottom of the pyramid

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