JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey responses are considered significant indicators of quality of care and patient satisfaction. A pressing need to improve patient satisfaction rates is significant as the CAHPS survey responses are also a factor in determining the amount a facility will be reimbursed by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid each year. Low overall CAHPS scores for an academic medical center’s dermatology clinics were anecdotally attributed to clinic type. Was it really clinic type that was contributing to low scores, or were there other factors?

Objective:

Determine to what degree patient satisfaction scores at the private dermatology clinic differ from the scores at the rapid access dermatology clinic

Methods:

This study consisted of descriptive quantitative and qualitative methods. Secondary data derived from the academic medical center’s Press Ganey website was analyzed for clinic type comparisons and unstructured data were qualitatively analyzed to further enrich the quantitative findings. The data were analyzed to determine the contributors responsible for each clinic not meeting national benchmarks. Then, a review of these contributing factors were further analyzed to determine the difference in CAHPS scores between the private and rapid access dermatology clinics to determine if clinic type was a contributing factor to the overall contributing factors. The data sample included 821 responses from May 2017-May 2018.

Results:

Overall, when both private clinics and rapid access clinics were viewed collectively, a majority of the patients reported stewardship of patient resources as the most poorly rated factor and physician communication quality as the most positively rated factor. However, when private clinics and rapid access clinics were viewed individually, the rapid access clinics contributed slightly to overall lower dermatology scores at this academic medical center.

Conclusions:

This study determined different factors were responsible for lower CAHPS scores for two different dermatology clinics. Some of the contributing factors are a result of the mission of the clinic. It was suspected that the mission had not been properly communicated to patients, leading to misaligned expectations of care at each clinic. Several recommendations for level-setting expectations are provided in this paper.