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Health Care Stories
CAHPS III Reports Team
CASE STUDY: Select MD
CHALLENGE: The majority of privately run Web sites that compare physicians rely on consumer-generated comments as the primary data to aid in decision-making. However, health care quality organizations that report clinic and hospital data don't typically include patient comments; instead, they report unfamiliar statistical data, such as clinical measures or CAHPS, which can be more difficult to understand and can present cognitive challenges for consumers.
WOWZA SOLUTION: In early 2008, Wowza joined the CAHPS III reports team to help design and build an experimental Web site to study how consumers use different kinds of information to make health care decisions. The team - comprised of researchers from Yale University, the RAND Corporation, Westat and several expert quality consultants - worked with Wowza to create a mock physician comparison Web site to collect data on how consumers use web-delivered information to select a doctor.
Creating the experimental data-driven site posed many challenges. First, we needed to create a brand identity, including a name, logo and colors for the Web site. Not only was the identity required to be authentic and trustworthy, so users will believe that the site is real, but the identity couldn't have a strong brand personality, or the branding may interfere with the experiment. Likewise, the site needed to have all the modal functions a user would expect to find on a similar Web site, and all of the data had to be weighed as evenly as possible, so as not to create a bias. Web usability is also critical because if users have problems using the site, the experimental data will be deemed unreliable.
The actions for each user are recorded and timed, and all the data is passed along to the research team in order to analyze each of the experimental arms.
RESULTS: When the findings of the experiment are available, the results should prove helpful in guiding the development of consumer-friendly, interactive health care quality data reports.