The receptionist checking me in for an early morning medical appointment could not have acted more disinterested: no eye contact, few words and papers pushed at me with no explanation.
Maybe she was just having a rough morning. But maybe she wasn’t.
Related: CMS hospital ratings: 60% of hospitals earned 3 stars or less
Some providers are spending time and money seeking feedback about their patients’ experiences, and surveys routinely arrive in patients’ mailboxes and inboxes following an appointment or hospital stay. I imagine most of them are not filled out and returned because unless the experience was inspiring or the shortcomings egregious, people move on.
Yet the feedback is important, as are more efforts at the national level to gauge care quality. For more than 15 years the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems has randomly surveyed patients, through a letter or phone call, after their hospital stay. The results are publicly reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, creating a sense of transparency and accountability, and the findings are tied to incentive payments. A year ago, CMS announced changes to the HCAHPS survey, in part to improve response rates and declining scores.
Likewise, The Leapfrog Group’s twice-yearly survey on patient safety and care quality is easily digestible by consumers because of its letter-grade scoring. The simplicity of the results also means that well-performing hospitals often make it the basis of marketing campaigns.
But here’s the thing: A hospital is not where the majority of our healthcare needs are met, now and in the future. Health systems and increasingly, private equity-backed providers, are focused on outpatient care, building ambulatory surgery centers to handle procedures that once required an inpatient stay.
That should suggest it’s time to rethink how best to help the consumer decide where to get this care. The Leapfrog Group, which already includes outpatient care as one of the sections in its hospital survey, started an initiative five years ago to survey ambulatory surgery centers. Play around on its site and you’ll see so many of these facilities do not respond to its survey of patient safety and quality.
I understand why a consumer might opt not to respond to a survey. When a healthcare provider doesn’t, well, that’s a big red flag, isn’t it?
