One day they love you, the next day they hate you. We're talking about patients, of course.
A new study suggests that the way patients rate doctors changes significantly based on the place they're receiving care. Patients who are treated by a doctor in an urgent care setting are much more likely to positively rate their experience than patients treated by that same doctor in the emergency room.
The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Dr. Christopher Jones, a medical professor at Rowan University. Jones cautioned in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that the study size was too small to force major conclusions, but said that the results were nevertheless compelling.
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Specifically, the 17 doctors who were reviewed all received lower patient satisfaction scores during their 17 ER interactions than they did from their 79 urgent care interactions.
Doctors received lower scores on every measure the patients were asked to review, such as how courteous the doctor was, how much he or she listened, the concern they displayed for patients, and the information they provided.
What the study didn't begin to figure out is why patients give doctors lower ratings in the ER. It might be because patients are in less-than-generous moods at the time, or it might be because the context of the ER makes doctors less pleasant than they are otherwise.
In the wake of efforts by insurers and the federal government to tie reimbursement for providers to outcomes, potentially including patient satisfaction, Jones argued the study is evidence that the context the doctor is working in has a big influence on how he or she will be rated.
"Our study shows that satisfaction scores patients give their physicians are influenced by factors other than just the patient-physician relationship," Jones told Reuters. "Until we determine how to control for these other factors, we should be very cautious about using satisfaction scores to make comparisons between different physicians."
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