Older adults' understanding of hypothetical community pharmacy quality report cards

Abstract

Background: Quality ratings for health plans and health services have become increasingly available to patients.

Objective: We sought to explore older adults' understanding of hypothetical community pharmacy report cards and the information they valued on the report card.

Methods: We recruited participants aged 50 years or older to complete a 59-question telephone survey. The participants reviewed 3 different pairs of report cards, which represented a hypothetical pharmacy, and each pair contained different quality metrics. The participants identified which pharmacy of the pair they preferred, and this served as the primary outcome. We asked the participants to rate the level of importance (4-point unidirectional scale, not at all to very important) of the star ratings, source of information, and quality metrics. We also gathered information about the participants personal experiences with medications and pharmacy services, their self-reported health, health literacy, health numeracy, and demographics. The frequency that the pharmacy with higher quality metrics was selected was reported. We used logistic regression to examine factors associated with correctly identifying the highest quality pharmacy for all 3 sets of report cards.

Results: Most participants (n = 152) correctly identified all 3 (n = 120, 79.0%) report cards for pharmacies with higher quality metrics. The source of the information, individual quality metrics, and star ratings were all perceived as moderately or very important by most participants. Ratings of importance were strongly correlated (r, 0.70-1.00).

Conclusion: More than 75% were able to correctly identify all 3 report cards with higher quality ratings. Most participants believed that the source of the information, the individual quality metrics, and the star rating were all important. Research is needed to explore to what extent patients would use these types of quality metric report cards to make decisions about where to obtain their medications.