Death by Patient Satisfaction in the ER

I’m an ER doc. My customers are my patients. Since American healthcare is a business with its own shaky bottom line, though it looks like a bottomless pit, the rage of customer satisfaction hit us hard.

 Patient satisfaction surveys are worthless. Here’s why

How valid is patient satisfaction as a measure of quality? Some conflicting research has been done, but a recent paper from JAMA Internal Medicine implies the answer is “probably not valid.”

A 'Dirty Bomb Explosion' Patient Satisfaction

Patient satisfaction is often claimed as a surrogate for healthcare quality. This is an incorrect and dishonest assertion and threatens to destroy the doctor-patient relationship at its most sacred juncture – the bedside.

Even as Patient Satisfaction Surveys Grow in Importance, Hospitals, Physicians, and Clinical Laboratories Struggle to Use That Data to Improve the Patient Experience

Experts point to the challenges: not only is there a lack of consensus in how to best measure patient satisfaction, but there are also different opinions as to what are the right steps providers should take to improve the patient experience.

Forget the Placebo Effect: It's the 'Care Effect' That Matters

What Kaptchuk demonstrated is what some medical thinkers have begun to call the "care effect" — the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health.

Patient Satisfaction Survey Study Halted; Mortality Increased 238% with Patient Satisfaction

“Thinking that doctors and nurses will only do the right thing in medicine by dangling dollar bills in front of us is actually a complete insult, and the companies and governments imposing these stipulations upon us need to redirect their actions towards their own flaws and greed.”

Patient satisfaction surveys and accidental pickles

I’m not denigrating satisfaction surveys; they have some merit, if properly designed and implemented. I’m bemoaning the observation that, as health care has gone corporate, it has steadily lost the essential awareness of all but the proverbial bottom line and that has now made satisfaction surveys necessary. Everyone’s at drive-thru, no one’s at the counter. Accidental pickles abound.

Patient Satisfaction Surveys: Really, You Need Them

The goal of any patient satisfaction survey must be to assess the patient's perception of the practice in three areas: quality, access, and interpersonal relations. It's not to assess whether or not the patient received sound medical treatment. Rather, it is to assess how the practice, not the doctor, treated the patient.

Stossel: I have lung cancer. My medical care is excellent but the customer service stinks

I shouldn't be surprised that hospitals are lousy at customer service. The Detroit Medical Center once bragged that it was one of America's first hospitals to track medication with barcodes. Good! But wait -- ordinary supermarkets did that decades before.

The Cost of Satisfaction

In a nationally representative sample, higher patient satisfaction was associated with less emergency department use but with greater inpatient use, higher overall health care and prescription drug expenditures, and increased mortality.

The Drawbacks of Rate-Your-Doctor Medical Transparency

Encouraging physicians to try to get glowing reviews may skew treatment in unhealthy ways.

The Perils of Patient Satisfaction Scores

Nearly all physicians are now subject to patient satisfaction ratings. In my case, and many thousands of my colleagues across the country, it is via the survey tool sold to healthcare facilities by the Press Ganey Company. There are also many, many online sources that rate physicians...

What Patients Need to Remember After Leaving the Hospital

New tools help patients retain critical information to continue the healing process once they get home.

When Physicians' Careers Suffer Because They Refuse to Prescribe Narcotics

In some new systems where doctors are reviewed by patients, physicians unwilling to supply addicts with pain pills receive poor patient-satisfaction feedback. That is judged as poor performance by hospital administrators.

Why Rating Your Doctor Is Bad For Your Health

The current system might just kill you. Many doctors, in order to get high ratings (and a higher salary), overprescribe and overtest, just to “satisfy” patients, who probably aren’t qualified to judge their care. And there’s a financial cost, as flawed survey methods and the decisions they induce, produce billions more in waste. It’s a case of good intentions gone badly awry–and it’s only getting worse.