Patient’s Utility for Various Attributes of Diabetes Care Services

Diabetes is rising like an epidemic in India. The prevalence of diabetes in India has reached an alarming level of 72.95 millions. The purpose of this article is to assess the relative importance of various health care service attributes in diabetes care. Our study uses secondary research and focus group discussion to identify the attributes of a diabetes specialty clinic. The attributes included in the questionnaire were the quality of the care provide by the health care givers, spend per visit, hospitalization expense, waiting time and the distance to the hospital. Conjoint analysis was used to assess the relative importance of the attributes. It was found that the hospital’s quality was the most important attribute while the distance to the hospital was the attribute with the least importance. Although the quality of the hospital is the most important criterion in selecting a hospital in diabetes care, factors like waiting time, spend per visit, and hospitalization expense play an important role in the selection. We assess the relative importance of these factors for the diabetic patients in India. The study is first of its kind and could help policy makers in designing better health care services in diabetes care.