Using consideRATE to Evaluate Patient Experience in a Cancer Center: Psychometric and Healthcare Assessments

consideRATE is a patient- and care-partner-reported measure of care experience during serious illness. We used consideRATE with patients and care partners at the Dartmouth Cancer Center to assess patient experience, evaluate psychometric properties, and explore scoring approaches.

Patients and care partners who are aged 18+ and English proficient participated in a cross-sectional survey. Participants completed consideRATE (8 items), CANHELP Lite (21 items), and demographic questions. Reliability was assessed using Cronbach's α, and validity was evaluated with Pearson's correlations. Continuous and top-box scoring approaches were used. Psychometric properties were analyzed for patients, care partners, and subgroups with lower educational attainment or income.

244 participants (114 patients, 128 care-partners, 2 unspecified) completed the survey. consideRATE has internal reliability (α = 0.86); the correlation (r) between consideRATE continuous scoring and CANHELP Lite scores for all participants was 0.5; p < 0.001, for patients 0.5; p < 0.001, for care-partners 0.5; p < 0.001, for patients (n = 71) with lower educational attainment 0.5, p < 0.001, and for patients (n = 50) with lower income 0.7, p < 0.001. We also found correlations between consideRATE top-box scoring and CANHELP Lite scores for all participants (r^pb = 0.4, p < 0.001), with stronger associations among the patient (r^pb = 0.5, p < 0.001) and lower income (r^pb = 0.6, p = 0.005) subgroups. We found discriminant validity between consideRATE and Single-item Health Literacy (SIL) measures for continuous scoring (r = -0.05 to 0.09, p > 0.05) and top-box scoring (r = -0.02 to 0.09, p > 0.05). We found no significant difference in overall experience between patients with solid and hematologic malignancy cancer categories.

We demonstrated in this sample of patients attending a cancer center that consideRATE has good internal reliability and is well correlated with CANHELP Lite.