What’s most important?

A federally-funded healthcare program serves medical professionals throughout the country and needed to prioritize its many features. The trouble is, a single practitioner in rural Kentucky needs something very different than a large clinic in St. Louis, and a new physician’s office has different needs than an established practice. How can the government communicate the best program features for each kind of doctor?

It gets even more complicated than that. The features being offered to providers are all essential and desirable. More income? Better practice hours? Greater independence? They’re all important. The trick is discovering which are most important to each different kind of practice.

Our research revealed different physicians’ underlying preferences, which helped our client understand the most important characteristics to communicate about their program.

To do that, we conducted an online survey among 1,300 physicians. We employed a MaxDiff analysis, which pits competing attributes against each other in order to find out which ones are the most important.

After that, we conducted a segmentation analysis to see how location, length of practice, physician type, and other attributes changed those perceptions.

Finally, the data was analyzed using a number of statistical techniques, including creation of Hierarchical Bayes standardized index scores,

which segments responses by practice size and physician type: PCP, specialist, and direct primary care.