Impact of a Physician Communication Development Program on Patient Experience Scores

Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are widely used for quality improvement, benchmarking, and physician compensation, yet few large-scale studies have examined interventions to improve scores. We examine the association of an annual, mandatory, peer-led continuing professional development (CPD) program at a large, multispecialty group practice aimed at enhancing patient-clinician communication. This quality improvement study analyzed ambulatory pre-post patient experience surveys from January 2018 to October 2022 for top box ratings for four PREMs focusing on provider communication for "explains", "listens" to them, "overall provider rating," and would "recommend" the practice were modeled using generalized estimating equations, adjusting for patient and provider characteristics. Over 1 million surveys per year were analyzed and the likelihood of top-box response in all four domains increased post implementation in 2019- 2022 compared to 2018 with all adjusted odds ratios > 1.0 and p ≤ 0.001. Our findings suggest CPD programs may improve PREMs in a large healthcare system, across all communication-related domains. However, there could be limits and a plateau to how much a CPD intervention can improve PREMs.