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Can this be right? Do our patients really rate us at the 25^th percentile compared to other hospitals? Are our employees truly less satisfied than 90% of other facilities? Do our physicians actually score our quality of care at the bottom of the barrel?

Most people in health care are deeply committed to what they do. Receiving objective data that shows their organization’s performance as low can be a knife to the heart. Once ...

“At our hospital, we’ve been told to give medicine to all our drug-seekers to improve patient satisfaction scores,” says an ER physician. A blog post on USA Today online expresses concern that patient satisfaction scores prompt physicians to give patients what they want in order to keep the patient “happy.” Clinicians sometimes push back at customer service initiatives and express frustration that “I’m here to save lives, and you want me to smile more?”

Why ...

I spent a lot of years working in hospitals, starting as a burn technician, becoming a registered nurse in intensive-care units and surgical services and ending up as a vice president for perioperative and emergency services. Being able to view health care from the bedside to the C-suite has been a wonderful experience and has given me perspective I would not have had working only as a clinician or an executive. Having now served as ...

Probably the most common questions clients ask me and my Research and Analytics team at Press Ganey revolve around response rates. For example, “What is my inpatient response rate?” and “Since only unhappy patients respond, won’t increasing my response rate raise my scores?” You can almost hear the frustration on the other end of the line as we explain that response rates have very little value as an analytic tool and even less value in ...

“Patients do judge the quality of clinical care they receive. However, they base their judgments on far more than the technical interventions, many of which they are unaware.”

—Irwin Press, Patient Satisfaction: Defining, Measuring, and Improving the Experience of Care

The sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health care system likely will result in increased patient volumes for hospitals and medical practices. As the nation moves toward value-based purchasing, patient satisfaction will become an increasingly ...

With the deadlines for public reporting of home health patient satisfaction data coming up fast, I have been reflecting on what home care leaders must be thinking about (assuming that what’s at stake has sunk in yet): “What could I do to ensure my agency gets or keeps a competitive advantage?” “What pitfalls are there?” “Will people really use these results to choose an agency?” “What will the media do with this comparative data?”

For ...

I have long held the belief that, more often than not, we in health care make things far more complicated than we need to. I concede that health care delivery is complex and there are some things that can’t be reduced to three easy steps. But I do believe there is ample opportunity for health care to simplify, streamline and identify the inter-relatedness of the issues we face. One such opportunity is with patient, physician ...

When you think of the phrase “patient advocate,” what comes to mind? Some might envision a patient’s family member who acted as liaison between the patient and the caregivers during the patient’s interaction with the health system. Some caregivers may conjure thoughts of patients for whom they have provided information on their rights and responsibilities. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary the word “advocate” has its origins in Roman law and became part of our ...