Motivating public use of physician-level performance data: an experiment on the effects of message and mode.

Despite widening efforts to publicly report health care quality data, patients appear to make little use of these data. Several studies indicate patients' interest in physician-level information, but actual use of physician-level data remains unestablished. Using a randomized experimental design, this study evaluates the extent to which use of a Web site offering physician-level data is affected by three parameters: invitation mode (mail vs. e-mail), employment status (employed vs. retired), and invitation message tone (risk- vs. gain-focused). The results find significantly higher use among those invited by e-mail (p < .001) and among retired adults (p < .001). Message tone is not significantly associated with use rates, but a borderline significant result suggests that high-risk message recipients behave differently from those receiving gain-focused messages (p = .052). The findings emphasize the importance of convenience and process-simplicity in fostering public use of quality data and call for further study of message-tone effects.