IT’S UNPRECEDENTED, according to the CEO and CMO of Press Ganey. In a piece they authored in the Harvard Business Review in May, they write that they are used to seeing patient satisfaction scores for overall care inch up by 1% a year.
Yet in just one month—from February to March—survey scores for overall care from more than 238,000 hospitalized patients rose 1.6% nationwide. That jump was eclipsed by score increases in covid hotspots: a 4.3% one-month increase in Washington state and a 13.2% spike in New York. Those gains came despite the fact that, they write, New Yorkers have been perpetually among the most critical in their ratings of care.”
As for ratings from surveyed patients on physician skills, those rose 2.4% nationally, but 2.8% in Washington and 10.4% in New York. Similar hikes were seen for nursing, overall courtesy, responsiveness and pain control. “This is,” they write, “the survey version of their banging on pots every night. In our data, they are banging louder and louder.”
