Modeling Patient Perceptions About Generic Drug Quality and Trust With Doctors: An Empirical Analysis for Creating Sustainable Healthcare

Abstract

As envisioned in SDG3, health equity is a fundamental component of sustainable healthcare systems, and generic drugs remove financial barriers. However, there is scant research on the quality of generic drugs from the user's perspective. This study aims to identify patient perceptions of generic drug quality and estimate its impact on their satisfaction by developing a model with misconceptions as a negative moderator and patients' trust with prescribing doctors as a positive moderator. Additionally, this research attempted to understand the difference in users’ perceptions about generic drugs and branded equivalents for quality benchmarking. Adopting the psychometric scale development procedure, validated 20 items, a five-factor multidimensional scale for generic dug quality using a cross-sectional survey that collected responses from patients ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> = 385). The analysis included exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and regression analyses using the SPSS process macro. Findings from the study show that five dimensions, such as effectiveness, accessibility, consumption easiness, governmental controls, and packaging quality measured generic drug quality, which significantly predicts patient satisfaction. Further, the research compares quality attributes of generic drugs with branded equivalents to draw valuable insights helpful to achieving SDG3.