In this week's Open Letter, we'd like to discuss our decision to change our survey vendor and process for evaluating patient satisfaction.

Why Change?
For more than 12 years we have contracted with a company called PRC to conduct our patient satisfaction surveys. This was a telephone survey and produced good information for our staff to use in improving patient satisfaction. However, PRC was unable to provide an overall satisfaction rating, so at their recommendation, we used one question from the survey as a "proxy" for overall satisfaction. That question was "How do you rate the overall quality of care?" This is a good measure for overall quality, but doesn't incorporate issues related to the overall experience with our services (such as the admitting process, discharge process, the room, meals, nursing responsiveness, physician interaction, satisfaction with radiology and lab, etc.)

The Senior Leadership Team and Board of Directors began a series of discussions relative to our reasons for measuring patient satisfaction and we asked ourselves: are we measuring patient satisfaction to get a good score, or do we want to identify areas for improvement and fix our shortcomings?

So, in September 2004 we began sending Press Ganey written surveys to patients' homes in order to evaluate and validate the PRC results. Press Ganey is the largest patient satisfaction survey company in the United States. Their comparative database includes 6,500 of the top health care providers in the nation. Those results demonstrated that we have opportunities for improvement in many areas of patient satisfaction.

Here are some points to consider:
• Press Ganey has a larger database - 6,500 clients, 850 hospitals in inpatient database
• More competitive database - rankings of the best-of-the-best
• Composite mean and percentile scores - provides one number, which is not a "proxy" for satisfaction.
   It is satisfaction.
• Written vs. telephone survey
• Better report format
• Survey questions more accurately identify opportunities for improvement
• Real-time comparisons
• More than 500,000 surveys used to calculate percentiles
• More robust questions that address the patient's overall experience

The result is that we are in the process of switching to the Press Ganey written survey in order to more
accurately reflect what our patients are experiencing. We will be measuring satisfaction in the following
categories: inpatient, outpatient, ambulatory surgery, ER, home health, long term care, and North Mississippi Medical Clinics.

If you receive a survey, we encourage you to fill it out and mail it back to us. We look forward to your feedback as we continue improving the services we provide.
 

June 12, 2005