Patients may be just as likely to respond to prevention messages from their health maintenance organization (HMO) as from their own physician, according to UCSF researchers who studied patients who received information about skin cancer.

"We now know that HMOs not only can successfully sponsor preventive health outreach, but also can design and conduct such education efforts without enlisting busy physicians to participate," says Barbara Gerbert, PhD, chair of the Division of Behavioral Sciences in the UCSF School of Dentistry and lead author of the study in the May issue of the Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Studies about how best to encourage patients to adopt preventive health behaviors are increasingly important because the US is rapidly embracing a model of health care delivery managed less by individual physicians and more by capitated plans, such as HMOs, Gerbert says. "The organization, in a sense, is taking on the role that physicians once played as the provider of messages regarding health care and prevention."

For the study, UCSF researchers mailed a questionnaire to a random sample of 981 patients to assess their concern about and risk for skin cancer. The patients belonged to a large medical group that contracts with several San Francisco Bay Area HMOs to provide care.

Findings showed that messages that appealed to patient concern about skin cancer were just as effective in activating patient response as messages that appealed to concern about the wrinkling and aging of skin.

"Patients responded to health preventive messages from their health care provider, whether an individual physician or HMO, more than to health preventive messages in general," Gerbert says. "This is good news, because HMOs are better equipped administratively to conduct mass mailings than individual physicians, therefore making preventive efforts logistically, and possibly financially, feasible.”

By Rebecca Higbee

1st appeared 5/29/97