Just because hospital patients in Florida receive some of the best care in the nation doesn't mean they're necessarily happy with that care. The Sunshine State was the only one to rank in both the top 10 in terms of quality of care (No. 8) and the bottom 10 with regard to patient satisfaction (No. 49) according to a pair of nationwide studies conducted by South Carolina-based health information services company The Delta Group.
Several other states, however, experienced similar results, leading the study's authors to conclude that in general, quality of care is not a good indicator of patient satisfaction. Ohio, for instance, ranked No. 1 in overall quality, but only 34th in satisfaction.
"This conclusion underscores the need for hospitals to engage in regular patient satisfaction surveys rather than assume patients are satisfied with their medical care simply because the hospital meets a particular standard of clinical quality," the study's authors wrote.
Overall, only two states--Wisconsin and Iowa--ranked in the top 10 in both quality and satisfaction. Three states/areas--the District of Columbia, Nevada and Hawaii--ranked in the bottom 10 in both studies.
To measure quality, the study pulled information from the Delta Group's National Quality Rating Database. The NQRD compiled statistics from several different sources, including the Hospital Quality Alliance, CMS's Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Database, and CMS's Medicare Provider Assessment and Review (MedPAR).
Among the study's other key findings, it was determined that six of the 10 states ranked in the bottom 10 for quality (California, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, Hawaii and Alaska) all hailed from the "Western region" of the U.S. Half of the top 10 for quality all reside in the "Midwest region" (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and North Dakota).
To learn more:
- read this Delta Group/CareChex press release
- here are the two studies and an analysis of the findings
- check out these comparative maps
- read this UPI piece