It is well known that patients admitted electively are more satisfied than those with an acute illness who come through the ED. In addition, patients admitted for medical problems have lower satisfaction ratings than those admitted for general surgery, subspecialty surgery, or obstetrics.
Therefore, if your hospital administration has pulled together statistics that purport to compare patient satisfaction for your hospitalist group versus all other admissions, you need to make sure that comparisons are made to a similar population, i.e., acutely ill patients admitted through the ED with medical diagnoses. The survey companies should be able to produce just such a comparison.
It is equally as important to make sure you focus on the total experience at the hospital and not just the questions specifically concerning only the doctors. Since hospitalists not only do front-line, face-to-face patient care, but also work with the team and attempt to improve the system to provide better overall quality, make sure to focus on questions like “How do patients rate the hospital?” and “Would patients recommend the hospital to friends and family?”
The other consideration is to understand how close the top quartile is to the bottom quartile, when comparisons are made with this data. In many of these surveys the patients are giving ratings on a scale of one to four, with many of the responses at three or four. Therefore, the top score might be a 3.6 and the bottom score average 3.2. It is important to understand if you are just minor adjustments away from being in a good range or if you are either so far above or below the standard of care that a real situation exists.
HM’s Role
Does the hospitalist model lead to better patient satisfaction? Like most things in hospital medicine, the answer is yes, no, and maybe. There are certain aspects of hospital medicine that should lead to happier patients:
- Present and easily available;
- Expert in hospital care;
- Improved coordination of care by specialists;
- Availability for multiple visits if patient condition changes;
- Availability to visit with loved-ones at their convenience; and
- Rapid response to nurse’s concerns.
There are aspects of getting your care from a hospitalist that may initially make the patient more concerned:
- They may be unfamiliar with the hospitalist and the hospitalist model;
- The hospitalist may demonstrate little or no knowledge of the patient’s history;
- The referring physician may not introduce the patient to the hospitalist; and
- The hospitalist may not explain the relationship with the referring physician.
How to Be Proactive
With all we have to do every day (and the list seems to get longer by the minute), it is easy to get perplexed by having to be responsible for the patients’ satisfaction with their hospital experience. That being said, hospitalists perform well when we step up to the plate and take action in these ways:
- Proactively meet with the person in the C-suite who oversees the patient satisfaction survey process or relates to the hospitalist group (e.g., vice president of medical affairs or chief medical officer) to better understand the survey results;
- Make sure if the data are being used to compare hospitalist care with non-hospitalist care that the comparison group of patients is equivalent (i.e., acutely ill medical patients admitted through the ED, not surgical or obstetrical patients);
- Make sure to focus not only on the “doctor-related” questions, but on patients’ overall satisfaction with the hospital; and
- Offer to help the C-suite improve patient satisfaction, but don’t attempt to “own” this performance measure for the entire hospital. Hospitalists can be helpful, but this is broader than any one group of physicians.