Measuring Patients' Experience of Rehabilitation Services Across the Care Continuum. Part II: Key Dimensions

To identify key dimensions of patients' experience across the rehabilitative care system and to recommend a framework to develop survey items that measure the rehabilitative care experience.

Data were sourced from a literature review that searched MEDLINE (PubMed), CINAHL (Ebsco), and PsycINFO (APA PsycNET) databases from 2004 to 2014, the reference lists of the final accepted articles, and hand searches of relevant journals.

Four reviewers performed the screening process on 2472 articles; 33 were included for analysis. Interrater reliability was confirmed through 2 rounds of title review and 1 round of abstract review, with an average κ score of .69.

The final sample of 33 accepted articles was imported into a qualitative data analysis software application. Multiple levels of coding and a constant comparative methodology generated 6 themes. There were 502 discreet survey questions measuring patient experience that were categorized using the following dimensions: rehabilitative care ecosystem, client and informal caregiver engagement, patient and health care provider relation, pain and functional status, group and individual identity, and open ended.

The most common survey questions examine the care delivery ecosystem (37%), the engagement of clients and their informal caregivers (24.9%), and the quality of relations between providers and patients (21.7%). Examination of patient's functional status and management of pain yielded (15.3%) of the instruments' questions.

Currently available instruments and questions that measure patients' experience in rehabilitative care are unable to assess the performance of rehabilitative delivery systems that aspire to integrate care across the continuum. However, question panels derived from our 6 key themes may measure the key concepts that define rehabilitative care and facilitate measurement of patient experience at the system level.