Surviving the Patient Satisfaction Survey

Patient satisfaction is often claimed as a surrogate for healthcare quality. This is an incorrect and dishonest assertion and threatens to destroy the doctor-patient relationship at its most sacred juncture—the bedside.

In the early 2000s the federal government discovered a new metric, patient satisfaction, and mandated hospitals to begin measuring and reporting satisfaction survey results. A generous interpretation is that the CMS mandate is a misguided attempt to guarantee quality in the healthcare for which they were paying.

The cynical view is that the patient satisfaction mandate is an indirect way for the feds to reduce payment. In 2012, CMS began to tie satisfaction survey results to Medicare reimbursement; nearly a billion dollars in payments to hospitals that failed to meet patient satisfaction metrics were at stake in 2013. This created the equivalent of a dirty bomb explosion in the C-suite of most hospitals.

Link to the article on Medpage Today: http://bit.ly/1zIxvXF