What type of quality information do consumers want in a health care report card?

Health care report cards have emerged as a new tool to achieve better informed consumer choice and improved health plan performance, With this new emphasis on information dissemination, almost all the attention and effort has gone into the development of valid measures of quality and plan performance. Very little attention is given to the question of what consumers want for making choices or how they will use the measures for choosing health plans. This study uses a focus group methodology and content analysis to explore consumer concepts of quality and to determine how consumers view the quality-of-care indicators that are appearing in report cards. The findings show that consumers have a high interest in quality information. There is a stated preference for quality indicators that reveal how well the plans perform on preventive care and on consumer satisfaction. Asking participants to actually make a plan choice on the basis of comparative plan performance data showed that stated preferences for types of information were inconsistent with actual choices.