Factors That Motivate Provider Switching: The Patients' Perspective.

Objective: To generate evidence regarding the specific critical incidents that prompt patients to switch care providers.

Study setting and design: Building on existing work on customer switching behavior, we applied the critical incident technique (CIT) to the health services research context and analyzed primary data obtained from 555 US-based patients who reported switching providers between 2018 and 2022 to develop a typology of the critical incidents that prompt patients to switch healthcare providers.

Data sources and analytic sample: Data were obtained from an online survey of adult US-based patients who reported switching primary care providers (PCPs) for non-insurance-related reasons. The survey was conducted from August to September 2022 using a quota sampling approach.

Principal findings: We found eight critical incident categories associated with patient switching: service encounter failures, pricing, competitor attraction, inconvenience, core service failures, involuntary switching, breakdown in shared decision-making, and service environment perception.

Conclusion: We offer explanations and suggest potentially useful evidence-based strategies for further investigation.