Can patients receive an ideal visit?
ASIM focuses on creating the best world
Picture this: A patient calls the office for an appointment and hears a friendly, efficient voice. For an urgent visit, he or she sees the physician the same or next day.The visit itself runs smoothly, from the prompt and courteous secretary to the attentive physician, who discusses everything from diagnosis and treatment to insurance issues and preventive health.
Those and other elements of the ideal patient visit formed the basis of a new patient satisfaction survey released by the Washington, DC-based American Society of Internal Medicine (ASIM). It was produced by the society’s Internal Medicine Center for Advance Research & Education (IMCARE).
"What we are providing is a self-assessment tool for physicians who are interested in trying to evaluate and improve the patient satisfaction in their practices," says Mark Leasure, deputy executive vice president of ASIM. The society is also developing a service to provide data analysis for practices.
By focusing on a single visit, ASIM produced a survey that dissects the experience of patients. "This survey focuses in on the interaction of a physician and a patient at one particular instance in time," says Christel Mottur-Pilson, PhD, former executive director of IMCARE and currently director of scientific policy for the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia.
"If you aggregate that over all the patients the physician saw over a time period, it gives a fairly good representation of the physician’s interaction style," she says.
Rather than simply asking one question about the physician’s thoroughness and competency, as many surveys do, this questionnaire includes 18 questions about the physician’s demeanor, explanations, thoroughness, instructions, and responsiveness.
For example, the survey asks patients "The doctor’s understanding of the reason for my visit was . . . ." and "The doctor’s encouragement for me to ask questions was . . . ."
IMCARE also is developing physician education material to go along with the questionnaire to point toward quality improvement.
So if doctors implement this questionnaire and raise their scores with patients, does that mean the ideal patient visit can be created?
"They certainly will approximate it better," says Mottur-Pilson. "It’s like anything ideal. You never will get there 100%. But that’s not the point. The point is you’re moving toward the ideal and getting closer and closer." (For an outline of the ideal patient visit, see p. 17.)
[Editor’s note: Anatomy of Patient Satisfaction: A Primer, which includes the survey tool, is available from IMCARE ($25 ASIM members, $50 nonmembers), 2011 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20006-1808. Telephone: (202) 835-2746, Ext. 253.]
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