A post by Andrew Barna

Anyone who has read my posts in the past, knows that I am all about enhancing the patient experience, but an odd question occured to me recently. It came while reading the cover story on this month's Healthcare Executive magazine, entitled Reinventing the Patient Experience. On the first page of the story, the reader is told 3 different times that improving patient satisfaction is critical for the success of the hospital. Of course, I believe this, but the question still came: how do we know? The holy grail of patient satisfaction is the (positive) correlation of patient satisfaction scores with net income or volume. This is an OK proxy for the true outcome that we are looking for, but does it really tell us if our efforts are influencing where patients recieve their care?

Obviously, a different kind of study (more longitudinal), conducted from a different perspective (community-wide versus hospital specific) would need to be done to determine the true answer to my question. Perhaps researchers have done or could do this kind of study. It would tell us with much more authority what aspects of the patient experience influence hospital or provider selection. Rather than what factors correlate with high likelihood to return scores, we could learn what factors influence actual patient utilization choices.

Come to think about it, this is a round about way of saying that the HCAHPS survey will likely reveal some new insights into patient satisfaction, just by virtue of the fact that this data will be standardized across the country and that it could be paired with all the other data that the government collects.

That reminds me: What's going on with HCAHPS? Tune in to my next post on Healthcare Tomorrow to find out.