Does Patient Experience Correlate With Overall Hospital Quality Ratings?

Area of Science:

• Healthcare quality assessment
• Patient experience research
• Hospital performance metrics

Background:

• Publicly reported patient experience (PE) scores and overall hospital quality and safety ratings (QSR) are increasingly important for consumer healthcare decisions and hospital reimbursement.
• The precise correlation between PE scores and QSR remains unclear, necessitating further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the relationship between publicly reported patient experience scores and hospital quality and safety ratings.
• To determine if higher quality and safety ratings are associated with better patient experience scores across a large sample of US acute care hospitals.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of public data from 2,384 adult US acute care hospitals.
• Abstraction of QSR from Leapfrog, Hospital Compare (HC), and US News and World Report (USN).
• Abstraction of PE scores from HC, USN, Healthgrades (HG), and Google.

Main Results:

• Significant differences in PE scores were observed across QSR categories in Leapfrog and HC (P < 0.001).
• Hospitals with higher QSR scores generally demonstrated better PE scores (Mann-Whitney U test, P < 0.001 for USN-ranked vs. non-ranked).
• Logistic regression indicated that some, but not all, QSR were independently associated with PE.

Conclusions:

• Patient experience and hospital quality often, though not always, correlate.
• The findings support the link between quality and patient experience but highlight nuances in their relationship.
• This study contributes evidence to the ongoing discussion on the interconnectedness of hospital quality and patient satisfaction.