What distinct categories of patients are there? How do their values differ when searching for doctors?

Peer-to-Peer Health

http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/02/28/peer-to-peer-health-care-2/

When finding recommendation for a doctor or a specialty, 52% of adult say they think health professionals are more helpful than peer sources when it comes to getting a recommendation for a doctor or specialist, 27% of adults prefer to ask friends family and fellow patients for this type of advice. Order adults are much more likely than younger ones to say health professionals’ opinions are more helpful. Generation X internet users (34-45) are the most likely age group to look online for information about health professionals.

When finding recommendation for a hospital or medical facilitates, 62% of adult say they think health professionals are more helpful than peer sources when it comes to getting a recommendation for a doctor or specialist, 27% of adults prefer to ask friends family and fellow patients for this type of advice. Older adults are considerably more likely than younger adults to turn to health professionals for this type of information

Online Health Seeking: How Social Networks Can Be Healing Communities

http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/10/25/online-health-seeking-how-social-networks-can-be-healing-communities/

1.  Internet

Adult: 61% get health info online (80% are internet users)

E-Patients: 60% consume social consume social media; 29% have contributed content; 19% consult rankings of providers (5% post them); 18% consult reviews of hospitals (4% post them)

2.  Other Data

60% of e-patients say the info found online affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition.

53% say it lead them to ask a doctor new questions, or to get a second opinion from another doctor.

38% say it affected a decision about whether to see a doctor.

On Going to See the Doctor, the Contributions of the Patient to the Decision to Seek Medical Aid: A Selective Review
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0021968163900997 

Features
1. Most participation and utilization studies, while seemingly similar to the initial process of seeking medical advice, are really the repeated use or reuse of the doctor-patient relationship. 

2. It is the choice between types of medical service, between public or private care, general practitioner or specialist, clinic group or solo practice, Doctor X or Doctor Y-choices in medical service about which there is great debate on what is good, better or best.

Factors influencing the decision to seek medical aid: the perceptions of and beliefs about symptoms, the expectations of medical personnel, and the rationale of the need for medical care. 

The decision is not necessarily idiosyncratic but often rooted in the patient’s social background.

Complexity, Public Reporting, and Choice of Doctors: A Look Inside the Blackest Box of Consumer Behavior
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23999489

The quality of choice erodes dramatically as choice sets incorporate more options and more performance metrics, even though the information on SelectMD was far simpler than on websites that also include cost measures, safety metrics, and assessments of electronic access.

Second, certain types of consumers are more susceptible than others to the challenges of complexity. Some of these susceptibilities relate to decision skills, others to decision styles.

Third, incorporating patient comments into public reporting clearly displaces consumers’ attention from standardized performance metrics, leading to choices that are suboptimal on those measures.

Use of  filters helps relieve cognitive burden by reducing the size of a choice set to one that seems manageable. In so doing, consumers often exclude the best clinicians