Measuring Primary Care Physician Visit Continuity and Patients’ Experiences of Visit Continuity

Abstract

To the Editor:— Dr. Wasson asserts that patient-reported visit continuity measures are valuable because they provide important information about how patients interpret the continuity of care they receive. We agree that patient-reported information is important. And we absolutely did not intend to cause the “elimination of patient reports” as Dr. Wasson says he fears. Patient-reported care experience information is key to a balanced portfolio of quality measures and indispensable to the goal of getting to a patient-centered health care system. However, our analytic findings led us to caution against relying on patient reported continuity of care measures in isolation — given evidence that they capture a combination of information about continuity along with information about other dimensions of the patient’s experience. Administrative continuity measures have proven, in our study and others,1 to provide a purer, more valid view of that dimension of care. Our results indicate that widely-used patient-reported visit continuity measures do not substitute for administrative data,2 especially if the goal is to understand how visit continuity with primary care physicians (PCPs) affects quality and outcomes of care.