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.

The utility for audit of manual and computerized problem-oriented medical record systems.

Objective assessment of the delivery of care requires an unambiguous record of all related events and decisions in the care process. Both the handwritten Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR) and its computerized successor, the Problem Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS) have been designed to facilitate audit of care delivery. In this study, a national sample of physicians was asked to determine which of these two record systems best serves the function of audit.

Assessing the problem-oriented approach to care delivery.

It is evident that there is wide difference of opinion about the utility of the problem-oriented approach to health care delivery. Review of the literature on the subject suggests that ongoing debate over the merits of the approach has been fueled by incomplete information about important elements of the problem-oriented philosophy. This essay discusses the arguments for and against the approach, attempts to explain how misunderstandings have limited previous efforts to assess the manual problem-oriented record, and suggests implications for the study of both manual and computerized applications of the problem-oriented approach to care delivery.