There is no denying that the healthcare market is rapidly becoming consumer-driven. Healthcare facilities are now forced to compete against one another to draw in new clients and keep current ones. Many of these organizations achieve high patient satisfaction ratings that show customers their worth as reliable healthcare partners and illustrate their value to consumers. Increased patient satisfaction levels have advantages beyond just attracting a sizable customer base. Patient satisfaction ratings and reimbursement rates are now closely connected to the changes in Medicare payment systems. These modifications have made providing high-quality patient care essential to an institution’s survival and have significantly impacted how each healthcare professional approaches patient satisfaction. Hospitals and their governmental institutions can assess patient satisfaction through quantitative measurements using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) rating system. The HCAHPS study can be divided into questionnaires assessing essential aspects of the patient experience, such as correspondence with doctors and nurses, the hospital staff’s responsiveness, hygiene, noise levels, palliative care, and information availability. Scores are given for all of these factors and more, and the total number of patients satisfied is then determined.
The idea states that a hospital’s reimbursements will increase approximately equal to their HCAHPS scores. Low HCAHPS scores, therefore, affect a hospital’s bottom line in two directions: by harming their reputation with customers and reducing the amount of money, they get from Medicare. The most financial support was given to the institutions with the highest HCAHPS scores and many other vital parameters, while monetary penalties were given to those with low ratings. It’s critical to pinpoint the factors that affect patient satisfaction because hospitals and other healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to perform better on HCAHPS surveys. Therefore, “it may be necessary to control for disease severity and diagnosis-specific outcomes, as these factors may not be controllable despite good medical care” (Anderson et al., 2020). For many years, surgeons have concentrated on outcomes like death, complication rates, or specific evaluations of surgical performance. It is unclear whether achieving successful surgical results is related to happy patients. Hospital factors and more conventional surgical outcomes gathered from the University Health Systems Consortium (UHC) database were connected with patient satisfaction measured by HCAHPS. According to the findings, patient happiness and “conventional” surgery outcomes are rarely correlated. High overall patient satisfaction was found to correspond with both hospital and surgery volume significantly.
On the other hand, small hospitals had a higher chance of ranking in the upper percentile for patient satisfaction. The HCAHPS domains employed for the analysis may cause differences in these results. A more significant HCAHPS composite score was utilized for comparison in the study linking patient satisfaction with small hospitals, including factors such as a clean and quiet rooms and food service. Larger hospitals seem to perform better on the overall HCAHPS recommendations, but smaller hospitals may be better at maintaining quiet, hygienic rooms and engaged nursing staff. Large hospital size, high surgery volume, and patient satisfaction seem correlated when utilizing the summative HCAHPS measures as the only outcome.
Patients’ perceptions of hospital care are now a key indicator of quality. Now that patient satisfaction ratings are publicly available and connected to Medicare reimbursements. Hospitals are encouraged to enhance people’s opinions of their service. While it has been demonstrated that increased hospital and surgical volumes and low-risk modified mortality correlate with higher patient satisfaction on the HCAHPS, “it is an undeniable fact that healthcare is a highly collaborative profession which demands contributions from various disciplines, including medical, nursing, and allied health” (Ng, & Luk, 2019). A collaborative team-based strategy is required to consistently raise the standard of care and alter patients’ opinions. Surgeons are ideally situated to drive the organizational transformation to deliver great team-based patient care.
References
Anderson, P. M., Krallman, R., Montgomery, D., Kline-Rogers, E. & Bumpus, S. M. (2020). The Relationship Between Patient Satisfaction With Hospitalization and Outcomes. Journal of Patient Experience, 7(6), 1685-1692. Web.
Ng, J. H., & Luk, B. H. (2019). Patient satisfaction: Concept analysis in the healthcare context. Patient Education and Counseling, 102(4), 790-796. Web.