Patient satisfaction and physician productivity: complementary or mutually exclusive?

Motivating physicians to increase productivity and maximize patient satisfaction may result in conflicted behavior, raising questions about whether one must be sacrificed for the other. To determine if high satisfaction (measured by Press Ganey patient satisfaction survey) can be achieved while maintaining high productivity (measured in McGladrey relative value units, MRVU), longitudinal data collected from January 2002 to July 2004 were modeled using repeated measures regression. A total of 136 000 patient-completed satisfaction questionnaires evaluating 417 physicians were collected for analysis.