Do patient satisfaction scores harm patient care?

A lawsuit filed by an emergency room doctor after she was fired underscores the growing pressure faced by clinicians to dish up solid patient satisfaction scores for the hospitals they work for. 

Dr. Eryn Alpert, in Seattle, alleges that Kaiser Permanente fired her because she criticized the health system’s patient scoring system after she refused to prescribe opioids unnecessarily and then received low satisfaction scores from patients, according to The News-Tribune. (Kaiser doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation, the newspaper said.) 

The 2010 healthcare reform law tied hospital reimbursement to such scores, which has pushed hospitals to rethink patient satisfaction. They have added valet parking and music therapy, taken steps to improve the food they serve, and gotten rid of waiting rooms. But questions linger about whether all patient demands are medically necessary. 

“Lawsuits like these — brought by physicians against their employers — will become more common as physicians push back on the use of paper-based patient satisfaction survey scores to measure performance,” Dr. Edward Shin, co-founder of Quality Reviews, which developed patient feedback software, wrote on LinkedIn. 

Nurses and other clinicians have also found that leaders’ growing attention to patient satisfaction scores has negatively impacted how they work. 

“Many of us are forced to work minimally staffed while forgoing patient care in order to meet volume requirements,” wrote Jean Polka Perkins, an orthopedic imaging technologist at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta hospital. “Then we are met with push back from unhappy management because they want higher patient satisfaction scores but refuse to supply us with the tools to make that possible.”

Clinicians, what’s your take on patient satisfaction scores? How have they impacted the way you work? 

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Today is my last day at LinkedIn, and #TheCheckup is going on hiatus. Stay tuned for what’s next. To keep up on health care news, my favorite hashtags to follow on the platform are #NursesOnLinkedIn, #digitalhealth and #medicine. Above all, I want to say thank you to this community for sharing your stories, sending me ideas, telling me what’s working (and what’s not) and letting me peek further in the world of clinical workers who are the backbone of the U.S. health care system.