Wednesday, September 26, 2018 7:35 AM–9:00 AM ePosters: P74. Clinic satisfaction tool improves communication and provides real-time feedback

Abstract

BACKGROUND CONTEXT Patient-reported assessments of the clinic experience are increasingly important for improving the delivery of care. The Clinician and Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CG-CAHPS) survey is the current standard for evaluating patients’ clinic experience, but its format gives 2-month delayed feedback on a small proportion of patients in clinic. Furthermore, it fails to give specific actionable results on individual encounters. PURPOSE We developed and assessed the impact of a single-page clinic satisfaction tool (CST) to demonstrate real-time feedback, individualized responses, interpretable and actionable feedback, improved patient satisfaction and communication scores, increased physician buy-in, and overall feasibility. STUDY DESIGN/SETTING This study was performed as a pre-post intervention design which included all physicians in our institution's multidisciplnary spine clinic who had a full year of CG-CAHPS baseline scores. PATIENT SAMPLE Physicians were included in the analysis if they were in: neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, or physiatry; outpatient practice at the spine center from January 2015 to December 2016; and active practice for the majority of the two years observed. All patients who presented for a visit within the spine center received a CST. OUTCOME MEASURES For each physician, monthly CG-CAHPS reports from January 2015 to December 2016 were collected, including global rating and physician communication subscores. The patient volume, the number of CSTs returned, the proportion of CSTs which were marked yes for satisfaction and questions answered, the number of comments, and the types of comments (positive, negative, not applicable) were calculated for each physician on a monthly basis. METHODS We assessed CST use for 12 months and compared patient-reported outcomes to the year prior. We assessed all clinic encounters for patient satisfaction, all physicians for CG-CAHPS global rating and physician communication scores, and evaluated the physician experience 1 year after implementation. RESULTS During implementation, 14,690 patients were seen by 12 physicians, with a 96% overall CST utilization rate. Physicians considered the CST superior to CG-CAHPS in providing immediate feedback. CG-CAHPS global scores trended towards improvement and were predicted by CST satisfaction scores (p CONCLUSIONS The CST is a low-cost, high-yield improvement to the current method of capturing the clinic experience, improves communication and satisfaction between physicians & patients and provides real time feedback to physicians.