Patients’ decision making process

Object: this work tries to solve some open issues related to the patients’ decision making process and their choice of the medical center for hospitalization among several suppliers of medical treatments; Methodology: taking behavioral bibliography into consideration, a decision making process is proposed;Results: this paper suggests that people’s choice are more reactive to the way in which a message could be given (i.e. physicians’ framing strategy) than to the content of that information;Conclusions: according to the gravitational behavior model, the physicians’ approach can induce an overestimation of the net benefit from going to the hospital located in the other region, higher than the net loss of consuming a quality level different from the desired one in the residential one.