The patient satisfaction trap

Some hospitals have argued for years that patient satisfaction scores can be misleading when it comes to gauging the quality of the healthcare services they receive. After all, patients are only human, aren't they? And can easily be swayed by factors that have little if anything to do with the true quality of care. A new study out in the Annals of Internal Medicine appears to back this view. RAND Researchers and a team from the University of California Los Angeles surveyed 236 elderly patients, asking them to rate the quality of the care they had received. The average response was 8 out of 10. Follow up on patient records determined that patients received the recommended care 55 percent of the time. Now those numbers may seem relatively unimpressive, but they are evidence of a something that many providers have intuitively believed. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

- see the abstract in the Archives of Internal Medicine

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