Are healthcare organizations making optimal use of the wealth of
data available for improving physician office patient satisfaction?
To the extent that results from individual patient satisfaction
questions are being analyzed and applied piecemeal, the answer is
no. To efficiently use data to improve physician office patient
satisfaction, a coherent strategy for making sense of the results
is needed -- that is, a framework must be built from the data.
Building a Framework: Identifying the Components
Using an investigative statistical technique to group results
from Gallup's aggregated database of physician office surveys from
2002, we sought to identify patterns and relationships among
satisfaction question items. The resulting groupings formed the
following five core question areas:
- Wait time for care
- The physician
- Wait time communication
- Office staff
- Nursing/caring
A closer look at these areas and the relationships between them
indicates that they fall fairly neatly into the hierarchy that
Gallup has previously identified for patient loyalty within the
inpatient, outpatient, and emergency departments of hospitals.
The lowest level of the hierarchy includes "process" issues,
including the amount of time spent waiting for care and wait.
Satisfaction items that fall into this process factor are related
to the efficiency of office operations. Patients have the prior
expectation that their physician's office will function
efficiently; if that expectation is not met, frustration ensues.
Process items are the types of questions Gallup has termed
"dissatisfiers": positive results are a prerequisite for success,
but they alone are not sufficient to build satisfaction and
loyalty.
Satisfaction and loyalty can be achieved by developing
emotional attachment with patients. Patients become emotionally
attached to an office through contact with the people working
there. This "people factor" includes question items in the areas of
"the physician," "nursing/caring," and "office staff."
Building a Framework: Assembling the Pieces
Once patient satisfaction items have been grouped together as
component "factors," it remains only to determine how patients tend
to prioritize those components in assessing their office visit. To
do so, we analyzed the results of individual question items to
determine which are most predictive of overall patient
satisfaction. Ranked in order of the degree to which the correlate
with overall satisfaction, the question items are:
|
Question
|
Component Area
|
|
Physician care and compassion
|
The physician
|
|
Physician skill in providing care
|
The physician
|
|
Physician ability to explain things
|
The physician
|
|
Satisfaction with nurses and clinical staff
|
Nursing/caring
|
|
How quickly you were able to see someone
|
Wait time for care
|
|
How easy it is to schedule a routine appointment
|
Wait time for care
|
|
Kept informed about reasons for wait
|
Wait time
communication
|
|
Satisfaction with clerical and business staff
|
Office staff
|
At least one question from each component "factor" identified in
the prior analysis is significant in predicting patient
satisfaction. However, two aspects emerge as most important: 1)
items relating to the physician him or herself, and 2) items
relating to patients' wait time.
Bottom Line
The factors that drive high patient satisfaction and loyalty
scores in a physician office setting are somewhat similar to those
driving such outcomes in the emergency department of a hospital.
Quick contact with a caring, technically skilled physician is key;
contact with other office staff members is less important. Such
prioritization is crucial in developing a comprehensive strategy to
improve physician office patient satisfaction, and maximizing the
odds for success.
