Please tick the appropriate box: Perspectives on patient reported experience

Knowledge on how to measure and interpret patient experience data

Patients have exclusive knowledge about important aspects of care, and measuring patient experiences provide us with unique information that can be used for quality improvement. Furthermore, positive experiences reported by patients have shown to be associated with patient safety, health outcomes and clinical effectiveness.

Inviting patients to give feedback on health care is an essential part of patient-centered care, and results of patient experience surveys are increasingly being used and acknowledged as an important parameter of quality.

Patient experience surveys are increasingly used as a method for evaluating important aspects of quality of care and the results are used politically to support general decision-making. However, there have been limited attempts to summarize the newest and most essential knowledge on how to measure and interpret patient experience data.

Conclusion and recommenation

Measures of patient experiences are important information and should be a priority for health care managers. However, there are significant challenges with regard to analyzing and interpreting data, thus practitioners must be cautious when using the information in quality assessment and in decision-making processes.

It is important to be aware of the differences between received care, patient experience and reported patient experience as these are very different concepts and a number of factors influence the associations between them. This awareness is especially important when using data for decision-making purposes.

Measures of patient experienced quality should not be used to conclude that the quality of care is good. Instead, patient satisfaction surveys should be used as a management tool for identifying areas of improvement. Whereas the knowledge that patients in general rated information about the risk of late effects much worse than information about surgical procedure and information on possible side effects provides a clearer idea that information on possible side effects should be improved. In this way, using patient experience scores relatively can be used to identify potential problems and priorities for quality improvement initiatives

There is conceptual and methodological uncertainty regarding what constitutes patient experience, and how it should be measured. There is a need for developing an explicit and accepted model and robust methods for the measurement and interpretation of patient reported experiences. The model depicted in figure 2 is a starting point.

The complexity of the concept should not stop us from using patient experience data. We just need to use them in a better way. Whatever theoretical challenges there are, we need to overcome them because the patient perspective on quality of care is crucial if we want to achieve a patientcentered health care system.

Please tick the appropriate box: Perspectives on patient reported experience