Information Provision and Demand-Side Barriers to Healthcare Innovation: Experimental Evidence on Shared Medical Appointments in Menopause Care

Alternative care delivery models may offer benefits to patients and providers, but adoption often remains low. We study whether brief narrative testimonials shift willingness to attend virtual shared medical appointments (SMAs), a relatively little-used care format in which 5-15 patients with a shared non-urgent health condition meet simultaneously with a clinician. Using a pre-registered field experiment with over 4,000 women aged 45–60 in the UK, we randomly assigned participants to view only standard descriptive information about menopause appointment options (the control group) or to receive testimonials about SMAs from either previous patients or a clinician (treatment groups). Testimonials more than doubled the share of women choosing an SMA: when appointments were offered with a 6-8 week wait, 11% of the control group chose an SMA compared to 26% in the peer testimonials arm and 24% in the clinician testimonials arm. Shorter waiting times further increase uptake. When the SMA wait was reduced to one week, the share of women ever choosing an SMA rose by 14-19 percentage points across arms, reaching nearly 40% in the testimonial groups. Treatment effects are systematically larger among women with greater information-processing capacity: university education, higher baseline menopause knowledge, and broader information-seeking. Our findings suggest that women’s reluctance to choose SMAs is driven primarily by demand-side barriers, including unfamiliarity and uncertainty about their benefits, rather than deep-seated aversion to group-based care. Testimonials appear sufficient to meaningfully reduce these barriers.