Beyond satisfaction in person-centered pharmacy services

Patient self-reported satisfaction is commonly used as an assessment of service experience and quality for community pharmacy services. This commentary discusses alternative foundational approaches to evaluating service experience and quality in patient-centered care. It describes historical and recent literature pertaining to the development and use of satisfaction measures for service design and patient experience assessment. It then highlights potential limitations of patient satisfaction as an assessment tool for patient-centeredness and patient experience identified in the pharmacy literature, which include criticisms that use of patient satisfaction may compromise accuracy in measuring quality due to factors such as patients having poor knowledge of and low expectations for quality and having a predisposition toward rating satisfaction highly when experiencing no-cost and/or unfamiliar services. Moreover, satisfaction measurements may change based on service exposure, with patient preferences for service offerings changing with increased service exposure and variation in patient-specific and environmental factors. After discussing limitations and criticism of patient self-reported satisfaction, we introduce alternative assessments methods which may facilitate more accurate assessments of patient experience and patient-centered pharmacy services such as patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs), patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), and human-centered design techniques such as journey mapping, prototyping, and user testing to design and assess patient-centered pharmacy services. These alternative assessments are rooted in, or related to preferred implementation science approaches to establishing, evaluating, and sustaining pharmacy services.