Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Providers' communication skills have a significant impact on patients' satisfaction. Improved patients' satisfaction has been positively correlated with various healthcare and financial outcomes. Patients' satisfaction in the inpatient setting is measured using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. In this study, we evaluated the impact of dynamic real-time feedback to the providers on the HCAHPS scores. METHODS: This was a randomized study conducted at our 550-bed level-1 tertiary care center. Twenty-six out of 27 hospitalists staffing our 12 medicine teams (including teams containing advanced practice providers (APPs) and house-staff teams) were randomized into intervention and control groups. Our research assistant interviewed 1110 patients over a period of 7 months and asked them the three provider communication-specific questions from the HCAHPS survey. Our intervention was a daily computer-generated email which alerted providers to their performance on HCAHPS questions (proportions of "always" responses) along with the performance of their peers and Medicare benchmarks. RESULTS: The intervention and control groups were similar with regard to baseline HCAHPS scores and clinical experience. The proportion of "always" responses to the three questions related to provider communication was statistically significantly higher in the intervention group compared to the control group (86% vs 80.5%, p-value 0.00001). It was also noted that the HCAHPS scores were overall lower on the house-staff teams and higher on the teams with APPs. CONCLUSION: Real-time patients' feedback to inpatient providers with peer comparison via email has a positive impact on the provider-specific HCAHPS scores.