HomeWhat's New Evaluating Patient Experience Key to Improving Practice

Evaluating Patient Experience Key to Improving Practice

10/16/2009

Elaine Skoch, RN, MN, EMBA, CNAA, spoke Thursday on evaluating patient experience.

Measuring and improving patient satisfaction may be the most direct route to improving your practice. That's the key message from Elaine Skoch, RN, MN, EMBA, CNAA, vice president for performance and improvement and practice enhancement facilitator for TransforMED.

"The patient is at the center of the practice," Skoch said during a TransforMED presentation Thursday on evaluating patient experience.

"Everything we do is for the sole purpose of improving patient care and improving patient involvement in care. The first step is to measure how well you are doing so you know where and what to improve."

Patient satisfaction measures more than how happy patients are with your services, Skoch said. "

Satisfaction is a direct measure of the patient's perception of how well the practice delivers on the promise of providing quality care. Patient dissatisfaction with long wait times means the practice is inefficient and may be providing substandard care," she said.

"If patients are unhappy with access to care, they are probably not getting sufficient information and help to guide self-care, which means they are probably not taking responsibility for their own health."

Patients need to have a voice in their own care, Skoch said.

"Our goals in the Patient-Centered Medical Home are to get patients actively involved in their own care and to enhance their ability to self-manage when they are not in the office," she said.

"The primary drivers of those positive behaviors are the patient's own experience of the health care relationship. They need to feel connected to the individual provider and to the entire practice."

TransforMED has long recognized the need for patient satisfaction evaluation tools, Skoch continued. There are a number of health care satisfaction tools available, but most are eight to ten pages long and not practical for the typical family practice. So TransforMED developed its own 20-question patient satisfaction tool that takes less than five minutes to complete.

PEAT, for Patient Experience Assessment Tool, explores the patient's perception of selfcare management, physician and staff communication, access to care, patient-centeredness and whole-person care, and overall satisfaction with services. Patient responses are measured on a seven-point scale ranging from "almost never" to "almost always." The survey also has a free text area for comments.

PEAT is designed to help practices improve over time, so it must be used repeatedly. Skoch said practices should survey patients at least every six months. Practices that want to change more quickly use the tool as often as every month. While PEAT can be completed online, Skoch said, a paper version is available for practices and patients that may not be ready for online data collection. Response rates average about 60 percent higher if providers and staff emphasize how important the survey is to improving care.

"Patients really want to get involved," she said. "You can look at yourself in relation to other practices in your area or to the entire database. You can also look at individual providers in the practice. The results tell you how you compare and how you are changing over time. And they generate very specific ideas about how to improve your practice."

Reprinted from Friday, October 16, 2009 edition of AAFP's publication UPCLOSE - A View of the Scientific Assembly

Find out more about TransforMED's Practice Experience Assessment Tool.

About TransforMED

The Leawood, Kan.-based TransforMED LLC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Established in 2005, TransforMED provides ongoing consultation and support to physicians looking to transform their practices to a new model of care that is based on the concept of a patient-centered medical home. TransforMED is an active member of primary care communities and recognizes and supports the unique value that primary care offers to patients and the health care system. TransforMED shares and supports the idealism and altruism of primary care physicians and the strong commitment to their communities and patients through continuing patient relationships and independent decision making. TransforMED offers practices both products and services, including consultation and advice on implementing the patient centered medical home model. To learn more about TransforMED, visit www.transformed.com.