Patient experience and clinical quality

With the market shift towards value-based and patient-centered models of care, improving patient experience is an increasingly common focus for hospitals. Good patient experience is an intrinsically valuable goal, and payers are increasingly emphasizing patient experience as part of care quality. Patient experience scores—reflecting factors as diverse as a hospital floor’s noise level throughout the night and how well nurses and doctors communicate with patients—have become key hospital performance measures.

Our analyses point to two main findings:

• Hospitals with higher patient-reported experience ratings have better POC quality scores
• Hospitals with higher experience ratings have better scores for some, but not all, clinical outcomes