IMPROVING PATIENT EXPERIENCE IN AN ACADEMIC CENTER BY ROUTINELY INTRODUCING PHYSICIAN TEAM MEMBER BY THEIR RESPECTIVE ROLE

Background: In an academic center, a physician team may be comprised of medical students, interns, residents, fellows and an attending. Patients encounter multiple members from the same physician team and this often leads to confusion in regards to their individual care. It is evident that this leads to patient confusion and misunderstandings can ensue. A significant component in satisfaction is the patient’s perception of communication with their physician. There have been few studies evaluating factors that contribute to patient satisfaction in the acute inpatient hospital setting. In the outpatient primary care setting it has been found that certain physician personality traits such as openness and conscientiousness resulted in higher patient ratings. It is necessary to further study how patient-physician communication can be improved in the hospital setting in order to improve patient satisfaction and hopefully influence clinical outcomes. We proposed that physician team members identify their roles to the patient as this will promote improved patient-physician communication and subsequently improve patient experience within our academic center.

Methods: Communication was enhanced through instructing attending physicians on components to include in their introductions to patients on admission and daily follow-up visits including name, service and role. Patients were provided with descriptions and roles of the physician team members with the ability to ask for clarification prior to meeting an attending physician. Patient surveys were conducted on admission and immediately prior to discharge over a 30 day period. Each survey had the same 8 questions on a 5-point Likert scale. Each question on the survey was given a score of 1-5 points based on the Likert scale points, giving each survey a maximum of 40 points.

Results: The medians of the admission (n=36) and discharge (n=29) survey total scores were 27 and 32, respectively. The data was evaluated using a Mann-Whitney U test . The two groups differed significantly, mean ranks of Admission totals and Discharge totals were 26.60 and 40.95, respectively; U = 291.500, Z = -3.051, p =0.002.

Conclusions: There was a statistically significant difference between patient perceived importance of being able to identify members of their physician team and their contribution to their care while hospitalized. These results reflect that patient perception of their care was influenced by standardized physician introductions while hospitalized at an academic center.