Background: Fewer than one in three patients can correctly name a physician on their inpatient care team. Despite the fact, factors associated with correctly naming a physician have not been adequately explored. This study evaluates whether physician behaviors and patient characteristics are associated with a patient’s ability to correctly name their hospitalist physician.
Methods: We conducted a post-hoc, secondary analysis of data collected in a single-center randomized study evaluating chair placement on hospitalist behavior and patient satisfaction. In the primary study, a medical student observed an inpatient hospitalist encounter and assessed hospitalist’s etiquette behaviors (Table 2). After the encounter was completed, the student collected patient characteristics and responses about the encounter, including the name of their physician, reason for admission, overall satisfaction with their physician (Table 1). The primary outcome was the patient’s ability to correctly name their hospitalist after the observed encounter. Patient characteristics and hospitalist behaviors were compared to the primary outcome using chi-square tests and t-tests. In a secondary analysis, we tested whether the ability to correctly name their physician was associated with improved patient satisfaction using t-tests.
Results: Of the 123 patients that participated, the average age was 53 years and 68 (55%) were male. Sixty-nine (56%) patients were White and 43 (35%) were Hispanic or Latino. 18% spoke Spanish. Thirty (24%) patients were able to correctly name their hospitalist and 98 (80%) were able to correctly name their diagnosis. There were no statistically significant associations between the patients’ ability to name their hospitalist and patient’s age, sex, race, ethnicity, language, medical comorbidities, ability to name the reason for hospitalization, duration of hospital stay, or consecutive days seen by the observed hospitalist (Table 1). Similarly, no hospitalist behaviors (introduction of name, explaining role, offering a handshake, offering to update family, or sitting at the bedside) were associated with the primary outcome (Table 2). In a secondary analysis, no significant association was observed between patient satisfaction and ability to correctly name their physician (P=0.11).
Conclusions: In this post-hoc analysis, we find that neither patient characteristics nor physician behaviors were associated with a patient’s ability to correctly name their hospitalist. Though it is possible our study is inadequately powered to detect significant differences, our exploratory findings suggest that a patient’s ability to name their hospitalist may be unrelated to patient characteristics or hospitalist’s behaviors and may not impact patient’s overall satisfaction with their physician.
