Patient Satisfaction and Patient Psychological Well-being

Patient satisfaction with physician communication is part of the HCAHPS patient satisfaction survey. HCAHPS is a mandated survey of a sample of patients discharged from hospitals to assess their satsifaction with hospital, physicians, nurses, and discharge process. While CMS has advised not to use the individual domains of the survey as those individual domains are not tested (as compared to the whole survey which is tested), hospital administrators continue to use individuals domains to reward/punish physicians.

This recently published study shows that patient satisfaction strongly depends on patient’s psychological well-being. It is unlikely that a physician has any strong influence on a patient’s psychological well-being and hence on the patient satisfaction. Interesting study! We need more such studies to tease out what factors (patient level or healthcare level) that affect patient satisfaction so that we can adjust healthcare delivery accordingly.