Introduction: CG-CAHPS is the current standard for evaluating patients’ clinic experience; however, its format gives delayed feedback on a small proportion of the total patients in clinic and fails to give specific actionable results on individual encounters. We assessed the impact of the Clinic Satisfaction Tool (CST) (Image 1), a single-page form implemented at our institution in January 2016, to facilitate physician-patient communication, improve visit satisfaction for patients and physicians, and provide real-time feedback to physicians.
Methods: We assessed CST use for 12 months and compared monthly outcomes to the 12 months prior. We assessed all clinic encounters for patient satisfaction with the visit (yes/no), all physicians for global rating and physician communication scores, and evaluated the physician experience after 1 year of CRT implementation.
Results: During implementation, 14,690 patients were seen by 12 physicians, with a 96% overall CST utilization rate. Physicians rated the CST as superior to CG-CAHPS in providing “immediate” feedback about the patient experience without adding to clinic workload. In multivariate analysis, CG-CAHPS Global scores over time trended towards improvement and were predicted by CST satisfaction scores and patient volume (p<0.05). CG-CAHPS Physician Communication scores were also predicted by CST satisfaction scores (p<0.01). High CST satisfaction scores were jointly predicted by patient volume and high utilization (p<0.001).
Conclusions: The CST is a low-cost, high-yield improvement to the current method of capturing the clinic experience, with the additional benefit of improving communication and satisfaction between physicians & patients and providing real time feedback to physicians.
Patient Care: The Clinic Satisfaction Tool provides a more informative assessment of the patient experience with care, by facilitate physician-patient communication, improve visit satisfaction for patients and physicians, and provide real-time feedback to physicians.
Learning Objectives: By the conclusion of the session, participants should be able to:
(1) describe the importance of patient feedback in clinical practice, (2) discuss the challenges of accurately capturing patient feedback, and (3) identify the Clinic Satisfaction Tool as a novel and useful method of assessing the patient experience.