The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has increased the number of insured Americans by more than 20 million individuals.1 Approximately half of the newly insured have an income at or below 138% of the poverty level and are on average younger, sicker, and more likely to report poor to fair health compared to those individuals who already had health care coverage.2 Specialties such as dermatology are faced with the challenge of expanding access to these newly insured individuals while also improving quality of care.
Because of the complexity of defining quality in medicine, patient satisfaction is being used as a proxy for quality, with physicians evaluated and reimbursed based on patient satisfaction scores. Little research has been conducted to validate the relationship between patient satisfaction and quality; however, one study showed online reviews from patients on Yelp correlated with traditional markers of quality, such as mortality and readmission rates, lending credibility to the notion that patient satisfaction equates quality of care.3 Moreover, prospective studies have found positive correlations between patient satisfaction and compliance to therapy4,5; however, these studies may not give a complete picture of the relationship between patient satisfaction and quality of care, as other studies also have illustrated that, more often than not, factors extrinsic to actual medical care (eg, time spent in the waiting room) play a considerable role in patient satisfaction scores.6-9
When judging the quality of care that is provided, one study found that patients rate physicians based on interpersonal skills and not care delivered.8 Another important factor related to patient satisfaction is the anonymity of the surveys. Patients who have negative experiences are more likely to respond to online surveys than those who have positive experiences, skewing overall ratings.6 Additionally, because of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations, physicians often are unable to respond directly to public patient reviews, resulting in an incomplete picture of the quality of care provided.
Ultimately, even if physicians do not agree that patient satisfaction correlates with quality of care, it is increasingly being used as a marker of such. Leading health care systems are embracing this new weight on patient satisfaction by increasing transparency and publishing patient satisfaction results online, allowing patients more access to physician reviews.
In dermatology, patient satisfaction serves an even more important role, as traditional markers of quality such as mortality and hospital readmission rates are not reasonable measures of patient care in this specialty, leaving patient satisfaction as one of the most accessible markers insurance companies and prospective patients can use to evaluate dermatologists. Furthermore, treatment modalities in dermatology often aim to improve quality of life, of which patient satisfaction arguably serves as an indicator. Ideally, patient satisfaction would allow physicians to identify areas where they may be better able to meet patients’ needs. However, patient satisfaction scores rarely are used as outcome measures in studies and are notoriously difficult to ascertain, as they tend to be inaccurate and may be unreliable in correlation with physician skill and training or may be skewed by patients’ desires to please their physicians.10 There also is a lack of standardized tools and scales to quantitatively judge outcomes in procedural surgeries.
Although patient satisfaction is being used as a measure of quality of care and is particularly necessary in a field such as dermatology that has outcome measures that are subjective in nature, there is a gap in the current literature regarding patient satisfaction and dermatology. To fill this gap, we conducted a prospective study of targeted interventions administered at outpatient dermatology clinics to determine if they resulted in statistically significant increases in patient satisfaction measures, particularly among Spanish-speaking patients.
Methods
We conducted a prospective study evaluating patient satisfaction in the outpatient dermatology clinics of LAC+USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, spanning over 1 year. During this time period, patients were randomly selected to participate and were asked to complete the Short-Form Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ-18), which asked patients to rate their care experience on a 5-point Likert scale (1=strongly agree; 5=strongly disagree). The survey was separated into the following 7 subscales or categories looking at different aspects of care: general satisfaction, technical quality, interpersonal manner, communication, financial aspects, time spent with physician, and accessibility and convenience. Patients were given this survey both before and after targeted interventions to improve patient satisfaction were implemented. The targeted interventions were created based on literature review in the factors affecting patient satisfaction. The change in relative satisfaction was then determined using statistical analysis. The study was approved by the University of Southern California Health Science institutional review board.