Using a NIATx based local learning collaborative for performance improvement.

Local governments play an important role in improving substance abuse and mental health services. The structure of the local learning collaborative requires careful attention to old relationships and challenges local governmental leaders to help move participants from a competitive to collaborative environment. This study describes one county's experience applying the NIATx process improvement model via a local learning collaborative.

A review of expressed emotion research in health care.

Much research has been carried out on the impact of family relationships on the development and course of different illness. Research on Expressed Emotion (EE) developed out of studies of the impact of family members on patients with schizophrenia, and has provided us with a robust measure of relatives' emotional attitudes towards patients, which has now been applied in the study of numerous psychiatric and medical illnesses. This review outlines the history of EE research in schizophrenia, and discusses the evidence for the association between family EE and the course of schizophrenic illness.

Patient satisfaction and experience with health services and quality of care.

This article discusses the use of patient satisfaction and personal health care experiences as a measure of health care quality. It also presents a field-proven patient experience and satisfaction assessment methodology known as the Patient Experience Survey (PES) that has been employed throughout the country for the last decade. Finally, it offers recommendations and comments on the use of patient satisfaction data in quality assessment and improvement.

Patient satisfaction surveys and multicollinearity.

The measurement of patient satisfaction is now an integral part of hospital market research. Just as consumer satisfaction is a function of the extent to which providers do things right, the value of consumer-oriented market research is directly related to whether the research itself is done right. The use of poorly designed consumer research instruments, no matter how well executed, can cause multicollinearity among the independent variables, which, in turn, can result in misleading conclusions.