Quality monitoring of physicians: linking patients' experiences of care to clinical quality and outcomes.

Background: Physicians are increasingly asked to improve the delivery of clinical services and patient experiences of care.

Objective: We evaluated the association between clinical performance and patient experiences in a statewide sample of physician practice sites and a sample of physicians within a large physician group.

Design, Setting, Participants: We separately identified 373 practice sites and 119 individual primary care physicians in Massachusetts.

Can teaching agenda-setting skills to physicians improve clinical interaction quality? A controlled intervention.

Background: Physicians and medical educators have repeatedly acknowledged the inadequacy of communication skills training in the medical school curriculum and opportunities to improve these skills in practice. This study of a controlled intervention evaluates the effect of teaching practicing physicians the skill of "agenda-setting" on patients' experiences with care. The agenda-setting intervention aimed to engage clinicians in the practice of initiating patient encounters by eliciting the full set of concerns from the patient's perspective and using that information to prioritize and negotiate which clinical issues should most appropriately be dealt with and which (if any) should be deferred to a subsequent visit.